Adding new subscribers to a publisher

We are using Merge Replication on SQL 2000
The snapshot on our publisher has a 180 day retention period. We are able
to add new subscribers just fine within that 180 days, but it seems that come
day 181 when we add a new subscriber it is missing a bunch of schema
information that it should be getting from the snapshot.
All the MS documentation on the retention setting points to keeping current
subscribers active and says nothing about are correlation to new subscribers.
I was wondering if there is relation between the retention setting and when
you can add new subscribers. Does anyone know? Thanks!
I got some more info yesterday from one of the logs. Turns out that the
snapshot is being marked as obsolete. From what I've read the only way a
snapshot can be marked as obsolete is by running one of the following:
sp_addmergearticle
sp_changemergearticle
sp_mergecleanupmetadata
We have not run any of these stored procedures, nor have we modified the
schema in any other way. So at this point it looks like the snapshot is
being marked as obsolete as soon as the retention period has passed. Does
this sound right?
"Paul Ibison" wrote:

> Ben,
> are you saying that a new snapshot doesn't have the same schema as the
> existing subscribers? What things are not being snapshotted, and is the
> snapshot definitely recent?
> Cheers,
> Paul Ibison
>
>
|||I just want to make sure I'm understanding this right. So if our retention
period is set to the default of 14 days and we set up a new snapshot on
7/1/07 then we have to make sure we get all of our subscribers added to the
publisher by 7/14/07 since we cannot add any new subscribers after 7/15/07.
Is this right?
The problem is that we will continuously be adding new subscribers one week
from now, one month from now and a couple years from now. So is our only
option then to lengthen the retention period to something like 1800 days
(around 5 years) and deal with the fact that our database will be storing a
ton of metadata?
Thanks,
Ben
"Paul Ibison" wrote:

> This sounds fine to me - once the retention period is reached, the required
> changes aren't there to make the snapshot data upto date.
> Cheers,
> Paul Ibison
>
>
|||Thanks Paul,
Our experience with running the snapshot agent is that all current
subscribers have to be resyncronized which with the publisher which is a lot
of work when you have a bunch of subscribers. Maybe we are not utilizing
something that would allow this to task to be less of a headache. If you
know of any documentation that may help us in this area it would be much
appreciated. Thanks!
-Ben Fyvie
"Paul Ibison" wrote:

> Correct ... or run the snapshot agent more frequently.
> HTH,
> Paul Ibison
>
>