Replication keeps popping up on SharePoint databases

My typical discovery scenario:

We receive an alert that the transaction log is growing quickly. We are in Simple Recovery so I go to check it out. Log is already sized to 100GB and is at 80% capacity. I run the "Whats using my log files" script from SQL Server Central and see that Replication is enabled on the database.

We do not set up replication, and I don't think Replication can be done on SharePoint content db's as Replication is not supported (requires PK on all tables). This has been occurring on random servers (about 5 so far, all within the past three weeks) and it only occurs on Content Databases.

sp_removedbreplication does not always work in removing the Replication either. We have found that we need to run the sp_removedbreplication, change all db owners to SA and reset Recovery Mode to Simple to completely eradicate any vestiges of this bug.

How would Replication be enabling itself? We have never set up Replication on these servers. There is no evidence of any type of Replication other than the 'log_reuse_wait_desc' from the DMV query and log growth. Any help on this ghost would be appreciated!

Solution 1:

Someone has to be turning it on. Sharepoint won't just enable replication by it self.

Setup a profiler trace for the replication stored procedures (I can get you some procedures names if needed) to see who is running them. That or enable server auditing for the execution of these procedures.