Continuing our series on replication, today we look at Snapshot Replication.  When is the best time to use snapshot replication?

1. Your data changes infrequently or you have a set of static tables such as lookup tables.
2. You have a small amount of data with which to replicate.
3. You make a great deal of changes over short periods of time.  For example, you have a database that only gets updated once a year like for open enrollment.

One of the caveats to snapshot replication is the snapshot folder permissions.  The replication agents must have the appropriate permissions to read and write to the snapshot folder.

Another caveat is that you can only compress the snapshot if it is less than 2GB in size.

Stay tuned and enjoy tomorrow as we configure the snapshot replication!