Replication: Changes to refresh operations that fail with dangling reference errors¶

A dangling reference occurs when an object in a replication or failover group has an object dependency on another object that is not included in the group. For example, a materialized view v1 in database db1 references table t1 in database db2. If db1 is included in replication group rg1, but db2 is not included in the group, a dangling reference occurs because the referenced object t1 is not included in the group that contains the referencing object v1.

In some cases, a dangling reference causes the refresh operation to fail:

• Referenced security policies are not included in the replication or failover group.
• Security policies are included in the group, but other required objects are not included in the group (for example, see Replicating network policies).
• The referenced object for a stream is not included in the replication or failover group.

The behavior for refresh operations that fail with dangling reference errors is as follows:

Before the change:

• Dangling reference error messages are not aggregated. Multiple dangling reference errors cause refresh operation failures to occur one after another, making it hard to address all issues at once.
• Dangling reference error messages do not include the fully-qualified domain name of the missing referenced object.
• A refresh operation with a dangling reference error might partially complete before failure, resulting in some objects being updated.

After the change:

• Dangling reference error messages are aggregated such that all cases that can cause refresh operation failures are surfaced at the same time.
• Dangling reference error messages include the fully-qualified domain name of the missing referenced object.
• Refresh operations with dangling reference errors fail before any secondary objects are updated.

Ref: 1555