title: Options for replicating a large amount of data to many subscribers
body: <p>I'm using transactional replication and have run into a problem. The problem is there's a table that stores Inventory QTY Per Site data, and it's huge. It represents 90% of the total data. Each subscriber is located at a different site, and really only needs the inventory qtys for the site its located at. The initial snapshot takes a really long time because of this big table, so i'm looking for some solutions to this. </p>
  
  <p>Here's some possible solutions i've thought of so far:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Initialize snapshots from a backup.</strong> This would be perfect, except for when a subscriber needs to be reinitialized. The sites are in a country that has unreliable internet - so the chance of a subscriber going offline for a long period is pretty high. </p>
  
  <p><strong>Compress snapshot</strong> - according to the documentation they recommend a reliable network, which isn't available.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Filter the big table by site</strong> in other words, only copy the data for the subscriber's site. I looked this up and apparently it's only available for merge replication? Maybe switching to merge replication would be a better option so that i can use parameterized row filter?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Dont replicate the big table, copy it with a job instead</strong> - copy it on demand or based on a schedule. However, i don't think there's a way to enable the table for transactional replication after copying the data like this, so it would get out of sync until you ran the job again.</p>
  
  <p>Is anyone aware of other possible solutions to this. I'm open to any suggestions, even switching to merge replication if that would solve the problem.</p>