Deciding what to copy

Before copying anything, we need to determine what to copy. In some instances, it might be necessary to copy the entire database for disaster-recovery purposes. At other times, such a copy would waste resources. We need to differentiate between these two scenarios.

Once we've done this, we should decide what to do when we don't want to copy the whole database. We need to know which tables to copy and where to send them. To accomplish this, we will build a very small spreadsheet in this section to keep track of the resources we will need for all of our table and database replicas.

Getting ready

We're going to build a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will specify the type of replica we want to maintain, as well as where it will reside. Have a spreadsheet program available before starting.

How to do it...

Follow these steps to determine replication resource requirements:

1. Create a spreadsheet with six columns labeled Source Server, Target Server, Type, DB Name, Table, and Set.
2. Under...