It is desirable to know if Shareplex can ignore activities on the source database at will. Namely, can the replication be turned off and at a later time turned on without having to go through the process of activation that requires downtime on source database?
General information.
It is possible for Shareplex to toggle between capturing changes on the source database and ignoring them, without having to activate prior to capturing changes again. A resync of target table(s) may be required if the changes did not make it to target because of this toggling. So the users need to be aware of this implication prior to trying this. Here is the procedure:
A.To enable the ignoring of changes occurring on source database:
sp_ctrl> set param sp_oct_gen_stop 0x3
sp_ctrl> stop capture
sp_ctrl> show (verify that capture is stopped by user)
sp_ctrl> start capture
B.To resume normal replication whereby the changes on source database are captured again:
sp_ctrl>reset param sp_oct_gen_stop
sp_ctrl> stop capture
sp_ctrl> show (verify that capture is stopped by user)
sp_ctrl> start capture
C.Resynchronize the target tables or complete target database at a later time as needed.
Even though Capture will not gather the changes occurring on source database when the parameter is enabled, it will still need to read the online/archived redo logs to gather row chaining information. Hence this procedure cannot be used as a proxy to let Shareplex ignore changes contained in the redo logs when such logs are not available. The viable option when such logs are not available is to run ora_cleansp on both source and target, resync and activate.
Disclaimer: As mentioned above, use of this feature results in out of sync (something that the users are probably aware of and prepared to accept, when they want to ignore changes on the source database). If in doubt about its implications, please call Support first.
