have determined that they need to perform the actual data transfer. However, since TCP can be used for normal DNS transactions, as well as for zone transfer, other zone transfer clients perform the SOA lookup preamble over the same TCP connection as they then (may) perform the actual data transfer. These clients open the TCP connection to the server before they even perform the preamble. The preceding describes full zone transfer. Incremental zone transfer differs from full zone transfer in the following respects: The client uses the special QTYPE IXFR (value 251) instead of the AXFR QTYPE. The client sends the SOA resource record for the zone apex that it currently has, if any, in the IXFR message, letting the server know which version of the "zone" it believes to be current. Though the server may respond in the normal AXFR manner with the full data for the zone, it may also instead respond with an "incremental" data transfer. This latter comprises the list of changes to the zone data, in zone serial number order, between the version of the zone that the client reported to the server as having and the version of the zone that is current at the server. The changes comprise two lists, one of resource records that are deleted and one of resource records that are inserted. (A modification to a resource record is represented as a deletion followed by an insertion.) Zone transfer is entirely client-initiated. Though servers can send a NOTIFY message to clients (that they have been informed about) whenever a change to the zone data has been made, the scheduling of zone transfers is entirely under the control of the clients. Clients schedule zone transfers initially, when their databases are empty, and thereafter at regular intervals, in a pattern controlled by the values in the "refresh", "retry", and "expire" fields in the SOA resource record of the zone apex. Limitations Though it is standardized, full-zone transfer being described as one of the possible database replication mechanisms in RFC 1034 and RFC 5936 (incremental zone transfer described in RFC 1995), zone transfer is the most limited of those database replication mechanisms. Zone transfer operates in terms of "wire format" resource records, i.e. resource records as they are transferred using the DNS protocol. However, the schema of wire format resource records may not be identical to the database schema used by the back