Extended Support for Large Object Datatypes

Replication Server 15.1 supports the replication of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 datatypes varchar(max), nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max). These datatypes can each store up to 2,147,483,647 bytes of data.

Replication Server introduces large-object (LOB) datatypes as user-defined datatypes (UDDs) in the table-level replication environment. Replication Server also supports database-level replication for new LOB types. The new LOB types are directly mapped to text, unitext, and image datatypes.

The base type of UDDs is:

New LOB Datatype	Base Type
`varchar(max)`	`text`
`nvarchar(max)`	`unitext`
`varbinary(max)`	`image`

For more information about the new LOB datatypes, see the Replication Server Reference Manual.

Limitations

The limitations of the new LOB datatypes are:

You cannot define as a primary key a LOB column in the table replication definition.
You cannot define as searchable a LOB column in the table replication definition or function replication definition.
You cannot replicate stored procedures that include one of the new LOB datatypes as a parameter.
You cannot use text pointers to manipulate the data of the new LOB datatypes.

Mixed-version Support

In a mixed-version environment, the primary and replicate Replication Server must have a site version of 15.1 and an LTL version of 710.