Monday 15 February 2016

Transactional Replication and Change Data Capture: The Log Reader Agent Conflict

Behind close doors of SQL Server, the following issue may be raised when Transactional Replication and Change Data Capture (CDC) are deployed and running together in the same database server, and because something was done incorrectly managing CDC jobs. We do know that two SQL Jobs are created for the CDC process when CDC is deployed which are 'cdc.MyDB_capture' and 'cdc.MyDB_cleanup'.
Looking into the first one, I would like to say that the 'cdc.MyDB_capture' job executes 'sys.sp_MScdc_capture_job' system stored procedure and it invokes 'sp_cdc_scan' to read internally the Transaction Log and capture the changes done in the database via the Log Reader Agent (created initially for Transactional Replication purposes). In other words, the 'cdc.MyDB_capture' job is the agent of CDC process which reads the Transaction Log by using the Log Reader Agent. Therefore, Transaction Replication and CDC running for the same database cannot use the same Log Read Agent at the same time. Otherwise, we will get this error:

The capture job cannot be used by Change Data Capture to extract changes from the log when transactional replication is also enabled on the same database. When Change Data Capture and transactional replication are both enabled on a database, use the logreader agent to extract the log changes.

The error message is really clear. Put differently, it is not possible that two Log Reader Agent instances are running on your database at the same time. When transactional replication is configured then the cdc.MyDB_capture job is (or should have been) dropped automatically and, if you uninstall Transactional Replication then cdc.MyDB_capture job is created again. To be perfectly honest, this behaviour is because Transactional Replication has the highest priority to use the Log Agent Reader. So, if you have transactional replication running for your database and cdc.MyDB_capture job is still enabled (and running) then you will have to disable or drop it manually since it will be failing and raising the error above. Thanks for reading.

1 comment:

  1. Very good points you wrote here..Great stuff...I think you've made some truly interesting points.Keep up the good work. reception data entry

    ReplyDelete

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HELLO, I'M PERCY REYES! — a book lover, healthy lifestyle lover... I've been working as a senior SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA) for over 20 years; I'm a three-time awarded Microsoft Data Platform MVP. I'm currently doing a PhD in Computer Science (cryptography) at Loughborough University, England — working on cryptographic Boolean functions, algorithmic cryptanalysis, number theory, and other algebraic aspects of cryptography. READ MORE