In a previous blog, we talked about integrating mobile RDB to enterprise clouds using Sync Framework 4.0. http://flicksoftware.com/2010/12/integrate-mobile-rdb-with-rdb-in-the-clouds-using-sync-framework-4-0/. Since then, we have spent some time to develop an OData + Sync client on Adroid and build a prototype on top of it.

The following is an intro to OData + Sync protocol from the Microsoft website. "The OData + Sync protocol enables building a service and clients that work with common set of data. Clients and the service use the protocol to perform synchronization, where a full synchronization is performed the first time and incremental synchronization is performed subsequent times. The protocol is designed with the goal to make it easy to implement the client-side of the protocol, and most (if not all) of the synchronization logic will be running on the service side. OData + Sync is intended to be used to enable synchronization for a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases and file systems. The OData + Sync Protocol comprises of the following group of specifications, which are defined later in this document:”

Our Android OData + Sync client implements the OData Sync:Atom protocol:  it tracks changes in SQLite,  incrementally transfers DB changes and resolves conflict. It wraps up these general sync tasks so that applications can focus on implementing business specific sync logic.   Using it, developers can sync their SQLite DB with almost any type of relational DBs on the backend server or in the cloud. It can give a boost to the mission critical business applications development on Android. These types of applications use SQLite as local storage to persist data and sync data to/from the backend (clouds) when connection is available.  So the business workflow won’t be interrupted by poor wireless signal, data loss caused by hardware/software defects will be minimized and data integrity will be guaranteed.  

Paul