Symptoms
Assume that you use merge replication that the Publisher is running on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1). After you upgrade the Publisher to SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 (SP2), you cannot restart the Merge Agent. Additionally, you receive the following error:
The merge process could not perform retention-based metadata cleanup in database 'MergePub'. If this failure continues, try increasing the query timeout for this process, or try reducing the retention period. When troubleshooting, restart the synchronization with verbose history logging and specify an output file to which to write.
When you execute the sp_mergemetadataretentioncleanup stored procedure manually on the Publisher, the stored procedure fails and you receive the following error:
Msg 206, Level 16, State 2, Procedure sp_mergemetadataretentioncleanup, Line 63Operand type clash: bigint is incompatible with uniqueidentifierMsg 206, Level 16, State 2, Procedure sp_mergemetadataretentioncleanup, Line 65Operand type clash: int is incompatible with uniqueidentifier
Resolution
The issue was first fixed in the following cumulative update of SQL Server.
Cumulative Update 3 for SQL Server 2012 SP2 /en-us/help/3002049
Each new cumulative update for SQL Server contains all the hotfixes and all the security fixes that were included with the previous cumulative update. Check out the latest cumulative updates for SQL Server:
Workaround
To work around this issue, execute the following query on the published database:if exists (select * from sys.columns sc inner join sys.types st on sc.system_type_id = st.system_type_id where object_id = object_id('dbo.sysmergesubscriptions') and sc.name = 'last_local_recgen' and st.name = 'uniqueidentifier') begin alter table dbo.sysmergesubscriptions drop column last_local_recgen alter table dbo.sysmergesubscriptions add last_local_recgen bigint null end
Status
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
