Doug Goldstein wrote:

Howard Chu wrote:

...

The examples in the Admin Guide are just that - examples. The doc states that it will work with any backend type, and uses a different backend type merely to illustrate that the backend type on the consumer does not need to agree with the type on the producer.

The Admin Guide says that only hdb and bdb will work due to the indexing and other data needs.

It says no such thing:

15.3.2. Set up the consumer slapd

The syncrepl replication is specified in the database section of slapd.conf (5) for the replica context. The syncrepl engine is backend independent and the directive can be defined with any database type.

The example it gives is a master with "bdb" and the consumers with "hdb" and my issue is that the example provided does not work as such.

The example works perfectly well for me. There is no way that just changing the database type would affect it. You must have changed something else as well.