Microsoft Sync Framework : SQL Server 2008

SQL Pass Conference & Synchronization to SQL Azure

liamca — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:34:00 GMT

Yesterday was the first day of the SQL Server conference, SQL Pass, here in Seattle. It was a really exciting day for me because I had the opportunity to present our new synchronization capabilities to the cloud in the opening day keynote and in a subsequent session.

We introduced the first piece of Project “Huron”, that is a technology based on the Sync Framework enabling people to use Windows Azure as a central Data Hub for all information. To accomplish this, later this month we will make available for download an early preview of a tool that provides the ability to extend a SQL Server on-premises databases to the cloud. Once configured users can then easily extend data from the cloud to mobile users and remote offices.

Using this tool and with the help of one of our partners, Archetype, we showed how companies can easily extend their on-premises SQL Servers to SQL Azure using data synchronization, allowing the data stores to co-exist and interoperate seamlessly.

All of this can be setup using a wizard. Then from an automatically generated SQL Agent, the synchronization process is executed periodically to move the incremental changes between SQL Server and SQL Azure.

Here are a few screenshots of the tool:

Watch for more details over this month at the Professional Developer Conference and in this blog for other new capabilities we are providing to for integration to Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

Liam Cavanagh

Announcing Availability of Sync Framework v1 and Sync Services for ADO.NET v2

liamca — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:08:00 GMT

I am happy to announce the general availability of Sync Framework v1 and Sync Services for ADO.NET v2. As of today you can download the Sync Framework SDK in 11 languages including Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Simplified), English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish for AMD64, IA64 and x86 processors from the Sync Framework Download Center.

What is Sync Framework?

Imagine being able to build a solution that seamlessly exchanges contact information between Outlook, a database contact management application, your mobile device and your service based contact management system. Or how about a mobile device that connects with other devices to exchange pictures and videos. How about being able to take data from any of your enterprise databases, file or enterprise systems and make it available offline for users to modify and sync back up to the enterprise. All of these capabilities are possible with the Sync Framework and best of all, it is free on Windows platforms and licensable on non-Windows platforms!

Just a few examples of companies that are already using the Sync Framework include:

SmugMug who has added support for the Sync Framework to enable developers to build rich offline applications that can allow photos to be easily shared on friends and families local computers.
InterScape have embedded Sync Framework into their Customer Relationship & Management (CRM) solution to enable sales people to synchronize enterprise files and data for offline access.
Fujitsu Siemens will embed the SyncToy file synchronization solution (powered by Sync Framework) on their STORAGEBIRD external drives to enable seamless file synchronization between devices and computers.

Sync Framework Highlights

Some of the highlights of this release include:

Sync support to new and existing applications, services, and devices
Collaboration and offline capabilities for any application
Roam and share information from any data store, over any protocol, and over any network configuration
Leverage sync capabilities exposed in Microsoft technologies to create sync ecosystems
Extend the architecture to support custom data types including files

Sync Services for ADO.NET v2 Highlights

Sync Services for ADO.NET is a Microsoft Sync Framework powered solution for synchronizing ADO.NET enabled databases in offline and collaboration scenarios. Sync Services for ADO.NET allows developers who are familiar with the concepts of ADO.NET to apply that knowledge to data synchronization through a very similar set of APIs to that of ADO.NET. Sync Services for ADO.NET provides the flexibility of a programming model like offline datasets and a richer synchronization feature set like that found in Merge replication. Sync Services for ADO.NET also supports synchronization over services, such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Some of the Sync Services for ADO.NET highlights include:

Offline Database Synchronization: With Sync Services for ADO.NET you are able to build a solution where multiple remote clients connect and synchronize to a central ADO.NET database in a Hub-and-Spoke configuration. This enables occasionally connected devices to periodically connect and synchronize changes with a central ADO.NET database server. This topology is a common solution for remote workers such as sales reps or field service workers.
Collaboration Between Databases: Sync Services for ADO.NET also includes Peer-to-Peer capabilities. Through a custom Peer provider, collaboration between two or more SQL Server databases can occur (support is not available for SQL Server Compact). Unlike a Hub-and-Spoke architecture, this provider enables a SQL Server database to communicate and exchange information with any other SQL Server database. This type of scenario is useful in group scenarios where users (such as auditors) need to update information and then collaborate those changes with other group members.
SQL Server 2008 Integrated Change Tracking: If you are using SQL Server 2008, we recommend that you use the SQL Server change tracking feature. This feature addresses many of the issues of custom-tracking systems and provides a straightforward way to track changes. Change tracking is also supported by the Local Database Cache in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Developers can now specify that the Configure Data Synchronization wizard should enable SQL Server change tracking on the server and generate the commands necessary to select and apply changes to the server database. Unlike custom change tracking systems, SQL Server change tracking does not require any schema changes in the server database. For more information, see the Visual Studio 2008 documentation.

Sync Framework Pricing

Sync Framework will be licensed free on Windows platforms. In addition, we are also licensing the specifications and a source code porting kit to developers who want to implement Microsoft Sync Framework solutions on non-Windows platforms.

To learn more, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/sync

I also want to send a special thank-you to those of you who have provided feedback throughout our CTP's and have helped make this a great release!

Liam Cavanagh

Using SQL Server 2008 Integrated Change Tracking to Optimize Data Synchronization

liamca — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:09:00 GMT

I thought I would take the chance to talk to you a little bit about a major enhancements we have made with synchronization in SQL Server 2008. The feature I am referrring to is called SQL Server 2008 Integrated Change Tracking.

The idea behind this feature is that it enables SQL Server to track data changes to your database rather than relying on you to create a change tracking technique.

Why is this feature so great? Well in my experience I have found that DBA's are less then enthusiastic when you tell them that in order to track changes, they will need to add triggers to each of the tables. Then they will either need to add an additional tracking column to that table (or to a separately linked table) and will need to create one tombstone table per table to track deletes. Oh, and by the way these triggers will need to be fairly complicated because you really need to deal with all of the isolation issues that come along with proper change tracking... and cross your fingers that these changes do not affect your existing applications. Not a fan of that idea? I am not surprised.

Well with SQL Server 2008, you can now simply turn on an option to enable change tracking. Then you tell SQL Server which tables you want it to monitor. From that point SQL Server will start monitoring these changes and store them in a separate change tracking table which you have access to. If you want to get the changes since a certain point in time you simply join the ChangeTable to your base table and presto you have all of the inserts, updates and deletes.

As an added bonus, this feature has been integrated into the existing Visual Studio SP1 beta that is now available for download. Guy Burstein has a great summary of this feature and I am going to steal one of his screen shots below.

As you can see from the screen shot, Visual Studio will detect if you are using SQL Server 2008 and let you choose to automatically enable change tracking for the tables you have selected to synchronize.

After you have selected change tracking, Visual Studio can go out and make the changes to your database for you. Of course, you still have the option to use the previous method of Change Tracking using triggers with SQL Server 2008. Visual Studio will still make those changes to your database to support change tracking, however given the performance of integrated change tracking and the added simplicity I think there will be very few times when the previous technique will be used.

Liam Cavanagh

Sample - SQL Express Client Synchronization using Sync Services for ADO.NET

liamca — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:40:00 GMT

We have just posted a new sync sample to our Code Gallery that demonstrates how to enable offline data collection applications to synchronize a SQL Express client database to another SQL Server database using the Synchronization Services for ADO.NET library. In this scenario, SQL Express client databases can be used as client databases to a central ADO.NET enabled database. Unlike the existing peer-to-peer synchronization SQL Express provider sample which you may have seen, this sample is optimized for a hub-and-spoke topology.

In this sample, two tables (orders and order_details) are on the server database and also on the local client database. The sample synchronizes edits to these table to keep their data identical.
This sample demonstrates:

Using SQL Express to cache changes for a client application.
A customized SQLExpressClientSyncProvider class that wraps around Microsoft.Synchronization.Data.Server.DbServerSyncProvider.

I would like to point out that even though we have done a fair amount of testing in house with this sample, it is still only posted as a sample. In the future we certainly plan of including a fully supported version of a SQL Express client provider within a future release of Sync Services for ADO.NET.

With that, we certainly want to hear your feedback on this sample and please feel free to post comments to our Sync Services for ADO.NET forum.

Liam Cavanagh

Video - Building Offline Enabled Applications

liamca — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:02:00 GMT

At TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando a number of our mobility specialists and Microsoft MVP's got together to discuss the concept of building offline applications for mobile and remote users. In this panel we discussed various concepts including optimizing data synchronization, scalability as well as techniques to improve the user experience of your mobile applications.

You can view this video recording in various formats here:

Building Offline Enabled Applications [MP4] [WMV Hi] [WMV Lo]

Panel Members:

Ginny Caughey - Microsoft MVP, Wasteworks
Steve Lasker - Sr. Program Manager, Microsoft SQL Server Compact
Rob Tiffany - Microsoft Mobility Architect
Rob Relyea - Architect, WPF Team
Liam Cavanagh - Sr. Program Manager, Microsoft Sync Framework

Announcing Sync Framework v1.0 RC0 and Sync Services for ADO.NET v2.0 RC0 [Updated]

liamca — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:12:00 GMT

With the completion of TechEd 2008 for Developer we have one last big announcement to make. A Release Candidate (RC0) of Sync Framework v1.0 and Sync Services for ADO.NET v2.0 for Desktops and Servers is now available.

These components can be found as a top level feature within SQL Server 2008 RC0. RC0 is the final step before SQL Server 2008 RTMs in Q3 of this year.

SQL Server 2008 RC0 can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center at:

SQL Server 2008 Release Candidate 0

For MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers, after logging into their respective accounts, subscribers can view Product Keys and download SQL Server 2008 RC0 from the following links:

Download SQL Server 2008 RC0 (MSDN subscribers)

Download SQL Server 2008 RC0 (TechNet Plus subscribers)

As we announced at TechEd, we are also targeting a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the Sync Framework on devices for Q3 2008.