For merge publications, the version of the Subscriber must not exceed the version of the Publisher

Working on a recent SQL Server merge replication project we needed to update some of the servers in a merge replication scenario without upgrading all of them. Consider a merge replication setup with a publisher, a distributor and 2 or more subscribers all on the same version of SQL Server, and you need to upgrade the SQL Server version on the subscriber to a newer version like SQL Server 2019.

Before doing any type of upgrade, I wanted to confirm that things would or would not work. First checking some Microsoft documentation it appears that replication from a SQL 2012, SQL 2014, SQL 2016, or any older version of a publisher is not supported to a subscriber running on SQL Server 2019. Or more specifically the subscriber needs to be on the same ore older version than the publisher.

To prove this I configured a publisher and distributor on SQL Server 2014, and attempted to configure replication to a subscriber on SQL Server 2019 and received the following error message:

Pretty straight forward as stated, the subscriber must not exceed the version of the publisher. So before we can upgrade the subscriber to SQL Server 2019 we would need to first upgrade the publisher to SQL Server 2019.

To test this even further I tried the same scenario with SQL Server 2016 as the publisher instead of 2014, and with the same 2019 as the subscriber, and the same error occurred.

I was however successful in creating a SQL Server 2017 Publisher and distributor with a SQL Server 2019 subscriber, so perhaps something changed in SQL 2017 allowing this to work.

More from Stedman Solutions:

Steve and the team at Stedman Solutions are here for all your SQL Server needs.
Contact us today for your free 30 minute consultation..
We are ready to help!