What is the Maximum Merge Articles in Merge Replication Possible Duplicate:
  Hard limitation for merge replication article count?  




I am using merge replication in SQL 2012. I am looking here:


Maximum Capacity Specifications for SQL Server (2012)


Scroll to the bottom and under the 'Replication Objects' it says that the maximum number of articles in a merge publication is 256.

I wasn't aware of this apparent limitation, but in the mean time I have been running merge replication with 456 articles and everything seems to run fine.

I found these 3 links about it:


Too many table names in the query sql 2005 merge replication snapshot error
FIX: Merge Snapshot Agent Fails with Error 50007: "Too many table names in the query. The maximum allowable is 256."
Hard limitation for merge replication article count?


So to summarise, apparently in SQL 2000 there was a bug which caused this limit. It was fixed in a service pack, but was reintroduced in SQL 2005.

Does that limitation still exist or not? There doesn't seem to be any official information about SQL 2012.

I would rather management studio tell me 'you cannot add more then 256 articles' rather than having to guess whether this will be a problem for us or not.
The first link you provided is official documentation for SQL Server 2012.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143432.aspx

The maximum number of articles supported in Merge Replication is 256.  This means that Microsoft will ensure up to 256 articles will work as expected.  I'm able to exceed 256 articles as well but I wouldn't do it in production.  You may want to consider splitting this up into multiple publications for production purposes.