Recommendations wanted for newbie to SQL replication

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I've worked with SQL Server since 1996, bit I'm just now having to venture
into the replication arena. Here's my situation...

I have a database at our corporate office - about 1.5 GB in size spread
across 100 tables and 450 stored procedures. The largest table right now
has about 600,000 records, but there are probably another 20 tables that
have over 100,000 records. I need to replicate this database to 8 branch
offices that are connected via VPN DSL connections (144KB IDSL on the
low-end, 3MB up/512 KB down on the high-end). Although the DSL connections
are fairly reliable, they do go down occasionally. There is no need to
real-time replication - if there is a delay of 5, 10, or 15 minutes (or
longer), it's not a major concern.

80% of the data is updated at our corporate and needs to be pushed to the
branches. 20% of the data is updated at the branch offices and needs to be
transmitted to the corporate office. There is no chance of data conflicts,
as the local branch offices can't update the data received from corporate,
and the corporate office can't update the data received from the branches.
Every table has been designed with a rowguid as its primary key (with a
non-clustered index, of course). I wish SQL Server didn't default the PK
index to clustered, but that's another rant. :-)

At first, I was first looking at transactional replication. but merge
replication is starting to look it might be a better fit (or maybe some
combination of both).

I'm also a bit concerned with getting the initial snapshot going at each
branch. Obviously, copying a 1.5 GB snapshot over a DSL connection is going
to take a while. Would I be better off overnighting a DVD or backup tape
containing the snapshot?

I appreciate any thoughts or recommendations!

- Mark


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