Bulk Materialization

With bulk materialization, you manually transfer subscription data between databases.

Use bulk materialization when a subscription is too large to copy through the network. Bulk materialization has very little effect on primary database clients or on the network.

You can use bulk materialization to create subscriptions for function replication definitions for replicated functions.

Bulk materialization uses these commands, which are executed at different points in the materialization process: define subscription, activate subscription, validate subscription. Use the check subscription command to check the status of the subscription.

Three bulk-materialization methods are available to ensure data consistency between the primary and replicate sites. The method you use depends mainly on whether applications using the primary data can tolerate interruptions.

You can use any of these methods for subscriptions to either table or function replication definitions. With subscriptions to function replication definitions, it may not be obvious which replicate tables will be affected by stored replicated procedures executing in the replicate database.

Before you initiate bulk materialization, you must consider these issues in relation to the existing data in the replicate database.

• Summary of Bulk Materialization Methods
  There are three bulk materialization method.
• Stop Updates at the Primary Database and Take a Snapshot
  You can use either of two bulk materialization methods to stop updates at the primary database and take a snapshot.
• Simulate Atomic Materialization
  Use simulate atomic materialization as a bulk materialization method when you cannot suspend updates to the primary database.
• Simulate Nonatomic Materialization
  Use simulate nonatomic materialization as a bulk materialization method when you cannot suspend updates to the primary database or if you cannot lock the primary data during the select or dump operation that retrieves the subscription data.