Considerations: Sharing some data through master sites

You might decide to set up master sites and shared views into tables at the master site, instead of replicating tables, for some areas of your system.

If all your sites are in a single database, you are effectively sharing many database tables already. However, we recommend that you set a master site for the intranet, in order to maintain customers, vendors, and items for all sites from the master site. You can optionally use the Intranet Shared User Tables form to share the Authorizations_mst, UserGroupMap_mst. Alternatively, you can use user_local_mst tables if you want to share users and group authorizations information between sites. You should not use the Intranet Shared Tables form; those tables are already shared because the sites are all in one database.

For on-premise environments only: If you have one or more sites in one database, and additional sites in the same intranet but not in the same database, you can use a master site and the Intranet Shared Tables feature to allow sharing between the sites in one database and the sites in other databases.

Advantages of using a master site

If you use a master site for certain functions, you have these advantages:

  • Establish central global tables, many of which allow filtering by site
  • Require less storage space – fewer records are replicated across the enterprise
  • Use less background processing
  • Simplify replication troubleshooting and querying of _all tables
  • Provide a lighter load on database servers, thus better speed for end users.
  • Centralize entry of customer, vendor and item records
  • For on-premise environments only: Centralize maintenance and validation of licenses if you are also using intranet licensing. See the information about intranet licensing in the Infor SyteLine Licensing Administration Guide.
  • Centralize maintenance of user and group information.
Note: Never select the Intranet Licensing option in a cloud environment.

Physical requirements (On-Premise Only)

  • There can be only one master site for a SyteLine logical intranet.
  • Live links must be set up (on the Sites or Sites/Entities form) between the master site and the other sites in the intranet.
  • Do not share _all or user tables across multiple SQL Server instances, because it may severely impact performance. We recommend that a master site and its subordinate sites reside on the same server in a linked SQL environment. If you have multiple SQL Server instances, you can set up one intranet per SQL Server instance name and use regular replication between the two master sites on those two intranets.
  • If a master site exists and has a shared table, all sites on that SyteLine intranet must share that table through views; you cannot have some sites sharing the table and some sites not sharing the table.
  • If you have multiple sites in different application databases on one SQL server, then you can perform one of these tasks:
    • Set up transactional replication between the sites
    • Set up a master site that shares its tables with other sites on its intranet
    • Set up a combined system, where the master site holds some shared _all tables, but some other _all tables are replicated between the sites
  • If you have multiple sites on separate servers or on separate intranets, non-transactional replication is probably a better choice.
  • If multiple sites exist in one database, then it is not possible to share tables in one site without sharing tables in all sites in that database.
  • Consider the load on the database used for the master site and the number of users/sites that will need to access the master site. In large multi-site systems, you may want to designate a site to be used only for that purpose, for better system performance.

    For example, you might not want the master site also to be used as a production manufacturing site.