I have a reasonably simple Merge Replication setup (if such a thing exists) between a Publisher and a single Subscriber, both full SQL Server machines.
The replication has been ticking over steadily for the last 2 years or so, and synchronization occurs every hour on the hour.
Over the last couple of nights I have commenced a project to import additional data into half a dozen or so tables that are being replicated, from a series of Excel spreadsheets. Several hundred thousand rows of data from various spreadsheets need to be imported.
I have used the SQL Server Import and Export wizard to import the data from the spreadsheets, and whilst this all works well, I noticed that the new records don't get included in the next synchronization.
To get around this, I ran a script to exclude these 6 or so specific tables from replication, invalidating the snapshot in the process, re-added these articles into replication, created a new snapshot, and then the next synchronization worked. Whilst this method "works", a lot of time is spent waiting for snapshots to be created, and due to the large amount of data, synchronization to occur
Is there a better way to import this data from an external source, so that I can avoid invalidating snapshots and so that only the new data needs to be synched?
I need to perform a similar task for another client, so would like to be able to do it "the right way" for next time