Maintenance Plan on Replication Subscriber I have seven subscribers to a replicated publication using transactional replication in SQL Server 2012.

Do I treat the subscribers just like a normal database and perform maintenance via a maintenance plan on them - or should they be left alone / treated any differently?

I know that Microsoft recommend backing up subscriber databases as usual, so I presume this would be part of a normal maintenance plan?
Do I treat the subscribers just like a normal database and perform maintenance via a maintenance plan on them - or should they be left alone / treated any differently?


Yes, subscriber databases should be treated as regular user databases &amp; you should intelligently perform Index maintenance (and do backups as well) . Infact, replication does not replicate index maintenance. Also, from BOL :



One suggestion - please do not use maintenance plan !