As a follow-up to yesterday's problems with exhausted identity ranges, I have come to a realization which I am now adopting as a best practice and I highly recommend for others:
For read-only articles (articles with @subscriber_upload_options = 2), always set @identityrangemanagementoption = 'none'.
The reasoning behind this advice is that when @identityrangemanagementoption = 'auto' (the default in Management Studio), identity ranges will be allocated for all subscribers, even though they will never use these ranges because the table article is read-only. Yet, if the table has a small datatype for a primary key (such as tinyint or smallint) it is quite likely that the identity range will be exhausted (with the default identity range being 1000, this doesn't take many subscribers) and when this happens synchronization will cease.
If there is a reason for allocating these ranges to read-only table articles or for leaving automatic identity range mangement enabled, please post it in the comments.
