About linking databases

Whenever you add a site in a new database to an existing transactional multi-site environment, you must relink all sites using one of the above methods. If you create and configure the new site by itself, it will prepare that database for multi-site work, but it will not know about other existing databases.

Although the databases do not all have to be on the local server, transactional replication is much more efficient when they reside on the same server.

You can add more links later, if you add more sites in separate databases.

When you link multi-site databases using either of the methods above, the following things are altered in the databases:

• site table: new entries are added or updated.
• *_all tables: row pointers are altered, foreign keys are temporarily dropped, tables are truncated and repopulated, and foreign keys are reapplied.
• ApsResyncAllSp runs against each database.
• site_group table: new entries are added or updated.
• site_live_link table: new entries are added or updated.

If you plan to use transactional replication between all the sites and entities in each reporting hierarchy or intranet, but also use non-transactional replication between sites in different reporting hierarchies or intranets, you should create a group for each reporting hierarchy or intranet and link together the sites/entities in each group.