3.0 Data Synchronization and Replication

The most potential and perilous problem arises when data inconsistency is observed between the mobile device and SAP system. To avoid such situations, a SAP business transaction should result in updating the enterprise data residing on SAP system as well as mobile device.

To implement this, SAP Mobile Engine ensures the availability of critical business data to the mobile device. The mobile device user makes desired changes to the data. This data is updated in the data container [The logical unit where data is stored] of the mobile device and when substantial number of modifications are made to data, it is updated in the SAP database. The Mobile Engine Synchronization Layer is responsible for this functionality and maintains data consistency (See Figure 4).

Figure 4: Data Synchronization

Data container exists on one place only in the mobile engine and hence during the process of data transfer, there is no possibility of a data container being lost in the engine. Moreover, data is not handed over to the other container if connection gets lost during synchronisation process between mobile device and SAP system. In such situation the data container stays on the mobile device and is sent automatically with next synchronization. It also ensures that data has been transferred successfully to the SAP system and vice-versa. Synchronization layer also provides data security by using HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

The Replication layer plays a major role by monitoring user synchronization process and uses Web Application Server (WAS) to determine data, which is assigned to multiple mobile device users.