I'm using Merge Replication to keep offline data synchronized with data on our server. Last night we made some schema changes along with some filter and article settings changes all at once. Doing all this required us to reinitialized all subscriptions(Mainly because we changed the filters). When we went to sync on the subscriber(client), we got a nasty error:
The schema definition of the destination table 'dbo'.'TABLE_NAME' in the subscription database does not match the schema definition of the source table in the publication database. Reinitialize the subscription without a snapshot after ensuring that the schema definition of the destination table is the same as the source table. (Source: MSSQL_REPL, Error number: MSSQL_REPL-2147199478)
So doing some research I found this article. This article says that it's possible that the schema version on the subscriber is higher than the one on the actual publication. I ran the sp that he presented and sure enough it was true. The local subscribers schema version was higher than what was returned on the publication.
My question is, why does this happen? What could have happened to cause this and what does this actually mean? How is something like this fixed?
We tried reinitializing with and without creating a new snapshot