About master sites and shared tables

If your environment has many sites, large amounts of shared data, and many users, you might want to set up one site as the master site for an intranet. Master sites are sites that control some data for all other sites on an intranet.

If you use a master site, certain tables can reside only on the master site and are shared (read and written to through a SQL view) by other sites on the same intranet. No replication needs to occur for the shared tables, which can greatly improve system performance and simplify the setting up of replication rules.

After you set up a master site for an intranet and share tables between the sites on the intranet, the intranet is considered a “shared table” intranet. You can add new sites to a shared table intranet. Removing sites from a shared table intranet is more complex, because you must first unshare the shared tables (that is, recreate them) at the site being removed from the intranet. For more information about sharing and unsharing _all and user tables, see the online help.

For more information about setting up master sites and shared tables, see the online help and your application’s Multi-Site Implementation Guide, if available.