Replication Security Enhancements

The replication security model has changed, allowing more control over the accounts under which replication agents run and make connections.

Replication Manageability Enhancements

Manageability enhancements include: improvements to the user interface, including a new Replication Monitor; easier management of tables with identity columns; the ability for transactional subscriptions to be initialized from a backup; easy-to-manage snapshots for merge publications with parameterized filters.

Replication Availability Enhancements

Availability enhancements include: the ability to make schema changes to published tables; peer-to-peer transactional replication; the ability to group changes to related rows in merge replication.

Heterogeneous Replication Enhancements

Heterogeneous replication enhancements include: publishing data from an Oracle database with transactional and snapshot replication; improved support for non-SQL Server Subscribers.

Replication Programmability Enhancements

Replication has a new managed code programming model: Replication Management Objects (RMO); merge replication allows you to introduce custom business logic into the synchronization process.

Replication Mobility Enhancements

Merge replication provides the ability to replicate data over HTTPS with the Web synchronization option.

Replication Scalability and Performance Enhancements

Scalability and performance enhancements include: significant improvements to the performance of filtered merge publications; the ability of the Distribution Agent in transactional replication to apply batches of changes in parallel to a Subscriber.

Enhancements for Updatable Transactional Subscriptions

Updatable Transactional Subscriptions can now handle updates to large data types at Subscribers.