Transactional Replication data during rebuild To offload reporting I have transactional replication running between my prod box and my reporting server (top image #1). This works great until the snapshot has to be rebuilt. During this time users/apps/reports are reading from an incomplete dataset while the reporting db is being rebuilt.

Does anyone else experience this problem? What is the best work around? 

Is #2 in the image a reasonable solution? Create a shell database on top of a data repo. The reporting DB no longer contains data but only views that replicate the structure of the tables in the data repo. During a rebuild of the "data repo" database the "reporting db" is set offline to prevent users/apps/repos from reading incomplete data?
The reporting DB no longer contains data but only views that replicate the structure of the tables in the data repo. During a rebuild of the "data repo" database the "reporting db" is set offline


Yes, that's reasonable.  You can further optimize this approach by pointing the users to a snapshot or restored copy of the subscriber database during the downtime, eg per https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/DataCAT/Microsoft-SQL-Server-Database-Snapshots-and-Synonyms/ba-p/304987, or by reinitializing the subscription from a backup, which might be faster than using a snapshot.

Or you could just disable the reporting users logins and kill their sessions during the downtime.