Replication of heteregenous Datasources

[ncage]

If someone is updating two or more database on a single save procedure is it better to take the hit up front by just sync. saves or is it better to just save to one database and let replication take care of updating the additional datasources? If thought maybe if the user only needed the data updated to every data source say hourly that maybe replication would be the way to go but i wasn't forsure. Another idea i had was to use MTS and MSMQ for async. updates but that would be very confusing to the user if there ever was an error because they would recieve an error message when they might not be on the screen they tried to update from or they might have already closed the application by the time the error takes place. Is there a good way to let the user know if an error happens when they are submitting an async update? Is there a better solution that i haven't listed here?

thanks
ncage

[JHausmann]

In my current setup, we have 8 servers that update a single server as the data is entered (which server the user logs to is transparent to them and is controlled by entries in an address table) The advantage is that the user only send the data to one location and that location deals with problems in transferring the data (single largest problem, replication breaks and we must diagnose, fix and re-start replication). You need to be aware how SQL server does updates (and deal with it accordingly), internally, as that's currently the main breaker of replication in our scheme.