Chapter 22. Placing SQL Server in your pocket
SQL Server is a database engine that can scale to cope with the largest data centers and astronomically sized datasets, but it can also scale down to support incredibly small and resource-constrained scenarios.
Many workforces are increasingly becoming mobile and working outside the fixed confines of an office environment. This presents a challenge to system architects, as they need to consider how to make their company data accessible to field workers while coping with issues such as the high costs and slow speeds (and potential unavailability) of network connectivity.
In building a traditional three-tier distributed application, you may have used SQL Server 2008 to store your data on a large centralized server and had clients retrieve data over the network on an as-needed basis.
When building mobile applications for devices such as laptops, Tablet PCs, and PDAs, you’re more likely to place a local data store on each client. This is required to store data so that the application can continue to function while offline. It may also be desirable to locally cache large fairly static datasets (such as customer or product lists) to avoid repeatedly transferring data over expensive or slow networks.
