Understanding Peer-To-Peer Transactional Replication

Peer-to-peer replication, also referred to as master-master replication, is built upon transactional replication in which changes at the subscriber are also replicated to the publisher.

A peer-to-peer topology consists of two or more databases where a change in each node (database) gets replicated at every other node (database) in the topology. Peer-to-peer replication therefore provides a scalable high availability solution.

A typical peer-to-peer transactional replication topology is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 2.36: P2P replication example

Node A and Node B are in a peer-to-peer replication. Any changes made at Node A are replicated to Node B and any changes made at Node B are replicated to Node A.

This topology has the following benefits:

• Reads are load-balanced between two nodes, thereby optimizing the read performance.

• Writes are load-balanced between two nodes. For example, let's say there is a customer table that stores customer...