I'm trying to find a way to set up an 'assets' database that holds common lists of data which will then be shared between several databases for various applications. Ideally I'd like that data to be updateable from any of the databases that use it.
Initially I looked into Transactional Replication. After several hours of setting up the replication agent accounts and troubleshooting various issues, I was able to work out and test Transactional publications, Peer-To-Peer publications, and Merge publications. One would think these would be suitable solutions.
The problem is that the subscribing databases need to be flexible enough to add columns to their schema - but this can't be done at the subscriber level without losing any variance of schema any time the subscriber is reinitialized.
My next consideration was to maintain the identical nature of the subscriber and publisher schemas, then to simply have a localized one-to-one related table to add any additional fields required by the subscriber. But this then poses problems to updating data in a 'flat' manner as updates can't be done across more than one table on a join.
Are there any other practical methods of sharing data across multiple databases? Would simply linking the master asset data to the other databases be a good option? I've read that linked databases are not typically suggested.
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!