Figure 24

There are several reasons you might want to merge a partition with its parent:

• The directory information in the two partitions is closely related.
• You want to delete a subordinate partition, but you don't want to delete the objects in it.
• You're going to delete the objects in the partition.
• You want to delete all replicas of the partition. (Merging a partition with its parent is the only way to delete the partition's master replica.)
• After moving a container (which must be a partition root with no subordinate partitions), you don't want the container to be a partition anymore.
• You experience changes in your company organization, so you want to redesign your directory tree by changing the partition structure.

Consider keeping partitions separate if the partitions are large (contain hundreds of objects), because large partitions slow down network response time.

The root-most partition in the tree cannot be merged because it is the top partition and has no parent partition to merge with.

The partition is merged when the process is completed on the servers. The operation could take some time to complete depending on partition sizes, network traffic, server configuration, and so on.

IMPORTANT:  Before merging a partition, check the partition synchronization of both partitions and fix any errors before proceeding. By fixing the errors, you can isolate problems in the directory and avoid propagating the errors or creating new ones.

Make sure all servers that have replicas (including subordinate references) of the partition you want to merge are up before attempting to merge a partition. If a server is down, NDS won't be able to read the server's replicas and won't be able to complete the operation.