Limitations of Direct Access

You should only use Direct Access on a forest that meets one of the following criteria:

• The forest is offline and not in an error state. A forest is offline if the availability is set to offline, or the forest or the database to which it is attached is disabled. For details, see Taking Forests and Partitions Online and Offline in Administrate MarkLogic Server.

• The forest is online, but the updates-allowed state of the forest is read-only. For details, see Setting the updates-allowed State on Partitions in Administrate MarkLogic Server.

The following additional limitations apply to using Direct Access:

• Accessing documents with Direct Access bypasses security roles and privileges. The content is protected only by the filesystem permissions on the forest data.

• Direct Access cannot take advantage of indexing or caching when accessing documents. Every document in each participating forest is read, even when you use filtering criteria such as -directory_filter or -type_filter. Filtering can only be applied after reading a document off disk.

• Direct Access skips property fragments.

• Direct Access skips documents partitioned into multiple fragments. For details, see Fragments in Administrating MarkLogic Server.

• Older versions of mlcp might not be able to read forest data from MarkLogic 9 or later. For best results, use the version of mlcp that corresponds to your MarkLogic version.

When you use Direct Access, mlcp skips any forest (or a stand within a forest) that is receiving updates or that is in an error state. Processing continues even when some documents are skipped.

When you use mlcp with Direct Access, your forest data must be reachable from the host(s) processing the input. In local mode, the forests must be reachable from the host on which you execute mlcp.

If mlcp accesses large or external binaries with Direct Access, then the reachability requirement also applies to the large data directory and any external binary directories. Furthermore, these directories must be reachable along the same path as when the forest was online.