Dropping article on transaction publications.

In 2005 transactional replication, The following procedure worked (without dropping the subscription) when I dropped an article from a replicated database:

Drop article: On Publication Properties, uncheck the article (table, stored procedure or function).

Create a new snapshot.

Synchronize the push subscription.

DROP the article on the Publication and Subscriber databases.

Replication still works!

However, the following article says the subscription needs to be dropped and re-created when an article is dropped from publication: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152493.aspx (Adding Articles to and Dropping Articles from Existing Publications ). For transactional publications, articles can be dropped with no special considerations prior to subscriptions being created. If an article is dropped after one or more subscriptions is created, the subscriptions must be dropped, recreated, and synchronized.

Under what conditions is dropping the subscription and recreating it absolutely necessary? I do not want to include this extra step.

Linda

Hi Linda, the documentation is correct. If you try to drop the artice via TSQL stored proc sp_droparticle, it will raise an error saying you you cannot drop the article because you have existing subscription. What I think BOL should say is that "the subscriptions to the article must be dropped before you can drop the article".

This is what the UI is doing - it will first drop the article from all existing subscriptions (via sp_dropsubscription), then drop the article from the publication and then invalidate the snapshot. So for existing subscriptions, there isn't anything else you need to do, but if you add a new subscription afterwards, you have to regenerate a new snapshot.

I hope this is a little more clear.