Enabling Publication Databases
When you click Next, you may enter the "Enable Publication Databases" dialog box, where you can enable individual databases on the publisher server for snapshot, transactional, and merge replication, as shown in Figure 6. You will not see this dialog box unless you've also enabled the distribution server as a publisher.

The dialog box in Figure 6 does not do as much as you might at first think. All it does is enable the databases for the stated type of replication for database owners. If you log into the publisher SQL Server with a system administrator account, you can initiate merge or transactional replication on those databases later without needing to check anything here.

Figure 6: You can enable publisher server databases for replication by database owners. If you are using a system administrator level SQL account, you do not need these databases enabled here.

In my opinion, the Enable Publications dialog box has some confusing terminology. Notice that it only gives you choices for transactional and merge replication?what about snapshot replication? It turns out that enabling a database for transactional replication here also enables it for snapshot replication.

Enabling Subscribers
The last step you make in the Configure Publishing and Distribution wizard is to enable subscriber databases, as shown in Figure 7. This dialog box is meant for named subscribers, subscriber servers that the publisher server communicates with by name. Information about the subscriber server will be stored in the publisher, in system tables that belong to the master database.

Figure 7: You can also enable named subscribers. SQL Server will store information about each named subscriber on the publisher.

Note that once you choose a subscriber server, a Browse button appears on the same line. If you click it, you'll see the login properties that SQL Server will store in the publisher, as shown in Figure 8. You can override these values later if you desire.

Finishing Up
To finish the configuration, just click Next on the dialog box, review your chosen options, and click Finish in the "Completing the Configure Publishing and Distribution Wizard" dialog box.

Once you've finished, SQL Server gives you a dialog box indicating success. When you click OK, you'll then see an informational message telling you that the Replication Monitor has been added to the Enterprise Manager console tree for the distribution server. The Replication Monitor is a set of dialogs located on the distribution server from which you can monitor replication. At this stage there's not much to monitor, so all it shows is the publisher server. The Replication Monitor becomes much more important once publications and subscriptions are defined.

Figure 8: The login properties of each named subscriber will be stored on the publisher server's master database.

Finishing at this point means that the SQL Server on the publisher server has been marked as a publisher, and that the particular distribution server you designated is that publisher's distributor. In addition, any named subscriber servers that you enabled, along with their login properties, will be stored in a system table in the publisher server's master database. The distribution server will now have a distribution database on it.

You can modify configuration options in Enterprise Manager by selecting the distribution server and then click Replication and then choose "Configure Publishing, Subscribers, and Distribution." The wizard you saw earlier when choosing this option is replaced by the Publisher and Distributor Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure 9. All these dialogs were accessed in some fashion during the Configure Publishing and Distribution wizard. However, note one difference: the Agent Profiles button and resulting dialog was not available in the wizard. These are profiles for the various replication agents that will be used. I'll discuss the profiles in more detail when I write about replication agents in a future article.

Figure 9: You can edit replication server properties after you've configured replication on the distribution server.

Removing Replication
To undo or remove the current replication configuration, choose the Disable Publishing and Distribution option from within Enterprise Manager, again having selected the distribution server in the console tree, and then the Replication menu option. When you remove replication, SQL Server will remove the entry marking the publisher SQL Server as a replication publisher, and remove the distribution database on the distribution SQL Server.

Once you've configured or installed replication on a set of servers, you're free to move on to defining the publications and articles (the data) that you want to replicate. When configuring replication, the steps are mostly the same no matter what type of replication you choose. But when defining publications and subscriptions, the three types of replication tend to diverge. How they differ, and what makes them unique, I'll leave for another time.