In SqlServer 2005 SqlExpress, I have a merge subscription that currently has a retention period of 0 (i.e. it never expires).
Whilst our data is a full set, we have the drawback that the meta data (msmerge_contents) is huge (4million rows), and the indexes on this are approx 1Gb, which impacts the amount of data we can hold (sqlexpress has 4Gb limit).
If I change the retention period to a value that is >0, the sp_mergemetadataretentioncleanup will run and clear out the meta data (it does not do that as it is set to 0, as noted here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178557.aspx )
However, what impact will there be to:
- the replication process (i don't want to kill it by giving it millions of rows to replicate and crippling the system).
- the disk space - will this help with my problem?
Many thanks.