Symptoms
Assume that you have a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) or transactional replication on partitioned tables in Microsoft SQL Server. When you do a partition switch or a merge operation that has pending replicated commands in that partition, you notice the following error entry in SQL Server error log:
Error: 608: No catalog entry found for partition ID <ID> in database <DatabaseName>. The metadata is inconsistent. Run DBCC CHECKDB to check for a metadata corruption.
Additionally, the log reader agent generates an access violation dump.
Status
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
Resolution
This issue is fixed in the following cumulative updates for SQL Server:
Note After applying this fix, if you perform partition switch or merge operation with pending replicated commands in that partition, you will still observe error 608 in SQL Server error log, but no access violation dumps.
About cumulative updates for SQL Server:
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:
More Information
If you enable partition switching on SQL Server 2008 R2 through the current version, you might also need split and merge operations in the near future. Before executing a split or merge operation on a replicated table, ensure that the partition in question does not have any pending replicated commands. You should also ensure that no DML operations are executed on the partition during the split and merge operations. If there are transactions that the log reader has not processed or if DML operations are performed on a partition of a replicated table while a split or merge operation is executed (involving the same partition), it could lead to a processing error with log reader agent. In order to correct the error, re-initialization of the subscription might be required.
For more information, see Replicate Partitioned Tables and Indexes.
Warning
You should not enable partition switching for Peer-to-Peer publications due to the hidden column which is used to detect and resolve conflict.
References
Learn about the terminology that Microsoft uses to describe software updates.
