Column data types changing during Replication

We have a set of MSSQL database servers which normally replicate several databases between them. One server is MSSQL 2008, another is MSSQL 2005, and the last is MSSQL 2000.开发者_StackOverflow社区

This has recently gone wrong, and I'm trying kind of desperately to fix things.

We have one MSSQL server which, every morning, receives a copy of an Informix database from our Informix server and dumps all of the data into the CompanyInformix database on the MSSQL server. It does this, as far as I can tell, correctly, and without error.

An hour later, that SQL server Pushes a Replication Publication to our two other MSSQL Servers, and to itself, Pushing out several tables from CompanyInformix to CompanyInforbits.

On two servers this works fine. On the MSSQL 2000 server, however, when Publishing occurs, all of the columns of datatype "date" are changed to datatype "nvarchar(10)". This is a problem.

I assume the root of this problem is that MSSQL2000 doesn't appear to have a "date" datatype.

This was working last week, and my attempt to recreate the Replication that was going on last week has obviously gone wrong, somewhere.

Can anyone suggest what might be going wrong, here and what I can do to prevent Replication from changing these column datatypes?

Yes correct, the date data type is not supported in SQL Server 2000.

What you have here is a mixed Replication topology, so you are going to have to implement some of the Microsoft recommendations for working with such an environment.

Take a look at the following reference: Using Multiple Versions of SQL Server in a Replication Topology

If you modify the data type at the Publication to be datetime, you "should" be able to maintain this data type throughout the topology.