Anonymous Subscriptions

An anonymous subscription is a type of pull subscription for which detailed information about the subscription and the Subscriber is not stored. Initiated at the Subscriber, the Subscriber is responsible for keeping an anonymous subscription synchronized.

Use anonymous subscriptions when:

• Applications have a very large number of Subscribers.
  
  
• You do not want the overhead of maintaining extra information at the Publisher or Distributor.
  
  
• If Subscribers use the Internet to access publications.
  
  
• All the rules for pull subscriptions apply to anonymous subscriptions.

A defining factor for deciding to use anonymous subscriptions with snapshot replication and transactional replication is the clean up of the distribution database. The distribution database is cleaned up by the Distribution Clean Up Agent, which by default is scheduled to run every 10 minutes. The Distribution Clean Up Agent removes replicated transactions from the distribution database; however, if you are using anonymous subscriptions, the transactions are kept for the retention period of the subscription to given anonymous subscriptions time to synchronize.

With merge, the significant factor affecting scale relates to whether or not Subscribers know about other Subscribers. Meta data is stored for all global subscriptions in the Sysmergesubscriptions system table. Information can be viewed about all Subscribers, the Publisher, and any global subscriptions to publications to which they are subscribed.

If you enable anonymous subscriptions for the publication, the user creating the pull subscription can specify that the subscription should be anonymous in the Create Pull Subscription Wizard, by using Windows Synchronization Manager or in the stored procedure.

To create a pull or anonymous subscription