Developing Moblie Data Applications that Scale to Thousands of Users

Rob Tiffany is a product manager in our Windows Mobile developer team. Rob has just published a book on data synchronization with SQL Server and SQL Server Compact Edition. The book is a step-by-step guide on building a scalable, high performance 4-tier architecture that scales to thousands of simultaneous users. The cool thing is that Rob does not only write about it, he has done it.

Using a 4-Tier Mobile Merge Replication architecture, Rob managed to get 1,200 concurrent Subscribers to change and replicate ~15 Million rows of data per hour!  Each Subscriber makes changes to an entire row of data per sync. Since each Subscriber changes a different row of data than his 1,199 friends, the entire system processes 1,200 different row changes per sync. This means I'm moving about 1.6 GB of data between SQL Server and 1,200 SSC Subscribers each hour.

Supporting 1,200 concurrent connections would e the equivalent of having an application being used by 12,000 sales people, as ane example, with 10% of them doing syncs at the same time.

You can read more about the book on the publisher's site or on Amazon.  You may also want to check Rob's blog https://blogs.msdn.com/robtiffany/ where you will learn a few more details and can see pictures of his setup.