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A Central Publisher is where your publisher and distributor resides in same server and you have subscriber in another server. If your distributor is not in the publisher server then your in Central Publisher with remote distributor. A Central Subscriber is where you have multiple publications replicate data to a single article this is done using filter option in article property. e.g say you want to replicate data from different sales region (based on SalesID) to a central subscriber table (with all sales region data) you should consider Central Subscriber method. There are various system tables and stored procedures to get the details about publisher, subscriber and distributor info. [sp_helpdistributor][1] [sp_helpsubscriberinfo][2] [sysmergepublications][3] [1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177504.aspx [2]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190494.aspx [3]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186769.aspx