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Always On? Not Quite Yet


Mobile database market faces evolving compute models, but a handful of best practices still hold true

By Geoff Koch
December 15, 2005 — 
Always-on computing is set to arrive any time now, according to tech optimists shouting from the mountaintops. Word is that, because of expanding spheres of wireless broadband availability and more powerful mobile devices, the era of cubicle-only access to applications, even big enterprise databases, is poised to pass away for good.

Yet Walt Tallman is bemused by these claims. Tallman, senior mobility integrator at the North Carolina Department of Transportation, supports a mobile database application used by the state’s bridge inspectors. Armed with tablet PCs and digital cameras, the inspectors look after thousands of structures from the remote eastern part of the state to sparsely populated coastal regions.

“North Carolina has lots of mountains where it’s impossible even to get cell phone coverage,” said Tallman.

A maturing market for mobile databases that work online or off is in many ways the bridge to the always-on future, which many less-optimistic analysts and technologists say is still many years or even decades away.

The market is crowded with the usual list of big database sellers and a slew of emerging companies focusing on specific industries, such as voice-over-IP telephony, or technical capabilities, such as embedding everyday desktop software into customized, distributed enterprise applications. Big questions hover above this fray as well, including the place of Linux and the effects of a slow turn away from client/server, toward a Web-centric, software-as-service compute model.

Despite the complexities, however, most agree on a straightforward handful of best practices associated with building and maintaining a mobile database for occasionally connected, field-based workers.

Sync’s the thing
Breck Carter, a consultant who used Sybase SQL Anywhere Studio MobiLink technology to design and implement the database synchronization feature of the North Carolina bridge inspector application, said that 100 percent automation of the synchronization process tops the list of essential mobile database features.

“It may be appropriate for a user to click on a ‘synchronize now’ button, but even that shouldn’t be necessary if a regular schedule is more appropriate,” said Carter, author of the “SQL Anywhere Studio 9 Developer’s Guide,” published in September 2004. “Any higher level of end-user involvement should not be required.”

Carter said other essentials include transmission protocols that send data without a lot of extra overhead or an excessive amount of handshaking, the ability to handle dropped data connections without any special recovery activity, and synchronization support for full-fledged relational databases, not just flat files or spreadsheets.

Combining big, multitable relational databases with tiny mobile devices may seem a daunting proposition. In many cases, mobile devices don’t need and can’t hold all the data held in a back-end data repository—the reason other technologists point to the necessity of dynamic and highly programmable APIs.

“When developing the application on a mobile database, the developer needs to have complete control over the data, including when and where it is replicated, and how conflicts between modified and replicated data from different locations are resolved,” said Ali Paasimaa, head of the Americas consulting practice for Solid Information Technology, which provides databases for telecommunication networks, medical devices and transportation fleet management systems.

With this increased control and power, of course, comes greater responsibility to rethink conventional software design patterns. For example, order entry databases often generate records that count up sequentially, an approach that won’t work when orders are entered into any number of disconnected devices that only later update a central application.

Another example is a hypothetical field salesperson who checks out a set of orders for a given customer, updates the orders while disconnected, and then checks them back in when reconnected to the network.

“Normal locking schemes obviously won’t handle this situation, so something programmatic is required,” said Neil Powers, vice president at the OpenEdge division of Progress Software, which offers an Eclipse-based integrated development environment for finance, health-care and other compliance- and audit-heavy industries.

BIG FOUR ON THE MOVE
The database industry’s heavy hitters figure prominently in any discussion of corporate or government users who access business applications away from the office. The big four—IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sybase—each touts the ability to extend database functionality to the edges of nearly any network.

Of the four, there’s little disagreement that Sybase subsidiary iAnywhere has the biggest share of the enterprise-ready mobile database market.

“And they’re No. 1 by a substantial margin,” said analyst Jack Gold, founder and principal of J. Gold and Associates.

In August, Sybase demonstrated Jasper, the code name for the next edition of the SQL Anywhere mobile data management and synchronization solution. Jasper includes new failover capabilities through server mirroring, materialized views to make it easier for developers to specify and store precomputed query results, and additional monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks.

IBM’s mobile database is DB2 Everyplace, a lightweight version of the same database that grew up on the company’s zSeries mainframe servers. DB2 Everyplace makes use of IBM technologies such as WebSphere Information Integration software, which manages diverse and distributed data with enterprise search, SQL and Q replication, and data and content federation.

“DB2 Everyplace is really all about providing a mobile platform that IBM Global Services can use,” said analyst Tony Rizzo, sector head of mobile technology at The 451 Group. “It’s most common in true [IBM] shops.”

Oracle, which beat IBM to market in 1979 with the first commercial product to use SQL, seems to be lagging the pack with Oracle Lite, its database for mobile, occasionally connected users. Like IBM’s apparent affinity for its own computing environments, Oracle Lite appears tightly integrated with Oracle back-end databases.

“Oracle suffers from a ‘show me’ problem,” said Gold. “In the mobile space, the company has really yet to show significant numbers of deployments.”

Indeed, the first two hits in a Google search for “Oracle Lite success stories” are customer examples from the iAnywhere Web site.

Microsoft’s mobile database business has similarly languished, even according to the company’s own engineers. When asked about SQL CE 2.0, the forerunner to its newest small footprint database, Microsoft’s SQL Server program manager, Durga Gudipati, said that there are “not many implementations yet.”

Yet there are several reasons to suspect that Microsoft’s mobile database fortunes may be changing. For starters, though, the company has been dabbling in mobile operating systems since the early 1990s. The 451 Group’s Rizzo said that it wasn’t until the 2002 launch of Windows CE 4.0 that Microsoft had its first serious mobile operating system.

“And Windows Mobile 5.0, released earlier this year, is much better and gaining real traction,” said Rizzo.

The new SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition, included in Microsoft’s Nov. 7 mega-launch of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, allows developers to create a mobile database using SQL Management Studio.

Other new features include SQL Server Mobile’s ability to handle multiuser access and data synchronization and a Smartphone emulator built into Visual Studio 2005.

“Whether you’re writing for the .NET Compact Framework, or writing native code in Visual C++, you can test your code in the emulator, which looks and feels like a real device,” said Gudipati.

Microsoft’s mobile database business also may benefit from the shift toward a services-oriented, on-demand compute model, perhaps best embodied by Salesforce.com, but also by OpenOffice and Google. This is paradoxical, since the turn away from client/server computing is widely seen as a threat to other established Microsoft product lines, including Office and even Windows.

SQL Server CE/Mobile deployments remain scarce, and “on-demand computing is the biggest opportunity for those companies with the smallest install bases today,” said Gold, adding that in another few years, because of Microsoft’s slow but steady mobile momentum and the move to services-oriented computing, Microsoft may be in the best position of the big four database vendors.

Whither Linux?
No Microsoft story is complete without a vexing open-source subplot, a maxim that holds true in this mobile database tale as well.

Gold and Rizzo said there are many open-source mobile database projects under way, including the IBM Cloudscape small footprint database server. But the analysts said there are few notable deployments, both because of the conservatism of CIOs and the still-immature mobile Linux ecosystem.

A Nov. 14 announcement by a consortium of companies working on Linux telephony may be an antidote to these concerns. The Linux Phone Standards Forum, or LiPS, hopes to standardize Linux-based services and APIs and otherwise accelerate the adoption of Linux in fixed, mobile and converged devices.

“With regard to how LiPS will affect what’s happening in the world of mobile databases running on the Linux platform, particularly databases that need to work in occasionally connected fashion, LiPS’ main mission is to fight fragmentation at the application level,” said LiPS board member John Ostrem, founder of China MobileSoft and lead scientist for PalmSource, one of the founding companies of the LiPS Forum and now a subsidiary of Access. “In essence, LiPS will work to achieve interoperability between smart phones, from low end to high end, and Linux enterprises.”

Meanwhile, other big industry players are at work to blanket the globe with broadband wireless signals, which may eventually squelch the need for offline functionality of any sort. In early November, chip giant Intel announced the actual or planned deployments by 24 carriers, Germany to Guatemala, of fixed WiMAX networks based on Intel technologies.

Yet in many parts of North Carolina, including the Smoky Mountains and the Outer Banks, always-on computing and communication is still decades hence, while the sometimes urgent need for mobile, occasionally connected data entry and data management is here today.

“There are about 19,000 bridges and culverts in North Carolina that need to be inspected on a regular basis, and there are about 60 field inspectors doing that, including four teams who work underwater,” wrote Carter in a case study describing his work in the Tar Heel State, adding with presumed understatement that “[t]hose inspectors are very busy taking notes and photos in the field.”

Without wireless connectivity, their need to manage mobile data online and off is now.


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