What is the purpose of the nolock option in the command “activate config”?
The activation process will attempt to lock a table but if the table is currently locked the activation process will wait for the lock to be released.
The activation will keep attempting to lock the table until the timeout occurs as determined by the setting of the parameter SP_OCF_LOCK_WAIT_TIME.
If the timeout occurs, there will be an error condition and the table will not be brought in replication.
To avoid such errors, you can use the nolock option when activating.
The syntax is as follows:
sp_ctrl> activate config <config_filename> nolock
When using the nolock option, the activation will not attempt to acquire a lock on the Source table and will bring it in replication regardless of any open transactions or exclusive lock.
In the case where there are any open transactions when the table was brought into replication, the existing DML pertaining to such open transactions will be ignored, but subsequent DML in those open transactions will be captured since the table is now a part of replication. This will result in partial transactions captured by SharePlex.
The thing to note is that not all objects are brought into the fold of replication instantaneously so there can be objects in replication with partial transactions and there can be others that will not miss any transactions depending on how busy the Source database is and when an object was brought into replication.
Due to this the Target table may be out of sync (OOS) with the Source table and may require a repair, copy, etc. to sync the Target table.
