The market place has been heating up with more powerful mobile devices that offer a broad spectrum of uses that extend beyond a personal device. The lines between a device for work and pleasure are becoming increasingly blurred and companies are adopting more uses for mobile devices in the Enterprise. With this trend comes increased complexity of how to extend traditional enterprise applications on these devices to increase users mobility, improve field services and drive new business efforts.
Recently I have collaborated with one of our Principle Application Architects to provide a high level review of this challenge using 2 of the top products inthe market today; Oracle Lite and MobiLink. Below is the summary review of the 2 products and how they stacked up as a platform for extending applications into the mobile enterprise.
Oracle Lite versus MobiLink
As the mobility market is increasing in popularity more companies are recognizing the value of pushing the current boundaries of enterprise applications to extend the reach into mobile computing. With the extension of the enterprise to mobile devices the strategy and technology used to support them has met the growing demand but offered some interesting new challenges along the way. There are many products on the market today that can be used for deploying mobile applications. I have been asked recently to compare two such products and offer a perspective. The two products evaluated which also happen to be leaders in this space; Oracle Lite and Sybase’s MobiLink. First let’s look at some of the core elements that are required of these products to baseline the evaluation approach.
As the mobility market is increasing in popularity more companies are recognizing the value of pushing the current boundaries of enterprise applications to extend the reach into mobile computing. With the extension of the enterprise to mobile devices the strategy and technology used to support them has met the growing demand but offered some interesting new challenges along the way. There are many products on the market today that can be used for deploying mobile applications. I have been asked recently to compare two such products and offer a perspective. The two products evaluated which also happen to be leaders in this space; Oracle Lite and Sybase’s MobiLink. First let’s look at some of the core elements that are required of these products to baseline the evaluation approach.
In comparing these products there were a couple of features that did seem to be product specific. Some things that Oracle Lite has that enhanced the synchronization solution are:
Device Manager for application updates and patches for each client – Need value statement here. Why is this important
Webtogo and OC4J for web based and J2EE applications. – Same as above why is this important
One distinct difference between these two pieces software is MobiLink is session-based replication vs. Oracle Lite uses asynchronous replication. Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages.
Oracle Lite Advantages:
Incremental downloads are fast because the data has been composed on the consolidation database.
MobiLink Advantages:
Consolidation is performed when the user performs synchronization.
Need to list advantages as well since it is stated above
Environment Baseline
In order to create an environment to equally test the two products I have set up a small application syncing 16 tables for both Oracle Lite and MobiLink. The database assumption will replicate the solution to an Oracle database as this appears to be a fairly common type of configuration in my encounters., To keep the anaylsis straight forward the key attributes that will be measured are:
Performance
Development
Maintenance
Troubleshooting
MobiLink Publication
To get a feel for the MobiLink product, I created a small synchronization model synchronizing 16 tables. These tables ranged from having a few records to one table syncing 140,000+ records. The development environment for an experienced SQL developer is pretty easy to follow. You can customize various events in the synchronization process to suit your needs. Once you have set up all your business rules and synchronization package, you deploy your model and the software creates scripts for the MobiLink server, a client database (distributed using batch files), and the SQL for your consolidated database.
Oracle Lite Publication
I also created an application in Oracle Lite using same tables as MobiLink to get a good baseline for performance and used the Mobile Workbench for development. If you have read my blog, you know that I use the Java APIs for development and the reason that I have chosen this path is that the APIs give me something that I can quickly reuse on any Mobile Server environment along with added flexibility in deployment options. With the Workbench, you first create the publication, then you create the publication items, you add your publication items to the publication, and finally you deploy your publication.
Results:
Performance
I had an assumption that Oracle Lite would be faster for synchronization performance, the only thing that I thought might be quicker in favour of MobiLink was the fact that it synched via TCP/IP. The test was to do an initial synchronization of 16 tables. MobiLink remote databases are already installed on the client, so they have a head start. But even with that head start, Oracle Lite was much faster then MobiLink. Oracle Lite synchronized 157,131 records in 13 seconds. The same amount of data took MobiLink 1 minute and 38 seconds.
The most common challenge for most new users of Oracle Lite is the sizing and background performance of Message Generator Processor (MGP). Sizing of the enterprise database for Oracle Lite accordingly, most people run into issues with space and IO waits. This is probably the most common factor that user run into with Oracle Lite. Typically back to my assumption replicated to an Oracle database. If you have Oracle DBAs already on staff, those skills can be leveraged to assist in the Oracle Lite optimization.
Development
Mobilink offers an advantage to very novice users and appears to have the better development environment. This is due to the fact that all the customization can be performed with modification to some simple SQL scripts. Based on your skill sets and strategy this might be an approach however it has some drawbacks. The most significant one is you have to go through these scripts to update various events with your new customized SQL each time and update or deployment is required. This might be ok for very small (30 – 40 tables) environments, but in true enterprise environments this could become more difficult exponentially.
Oracle offers a different approach to this same type of synchronization event. They achieve this in a similar manner by allowing you to adjust the Sql neede for replication but they build the deployment packages for you. These packages can be tailored or customized if necessary but in my experience it has not been neccasary. The one benefit I did find with Oracle Lite is using the API’s for advanced tasks. The API’s allowed me to create integration scripts that could be reused and ended up making the deployments much easier to manage.
Schema Evolution
Schema evolution is the changes that happen to a database during the life cycle of the application. Tables can be added, modified or deleted during the life of an application. Schema evolution is usually a significant challenge for most mobile systems because getting a schema changes to the client without disrupting the users is extremely difficult.
Oracle Lite holds a clear advantage in schema evolution. In Oracle Lite, to make changes to a table in you application:
1. Stop Mobile Server.
2. Change the Oracle database schema (add/drop column).3. Create a Java program to call the ConsolidatorManager API AlterPublicationItem().4. Start Mobile Server 5. Execute sync from the client 6. The change to the table will now be available on the client.
Typically you should not have to stop/start the server, you can just reset the metadata cache, but it is good practice to shut down the server so no one tries a sync while you are performing the change.
For MobiLink schema evolution, I am going to send you to Dr. Dobbs Portal. Apparently to achieve the same function you have to build something that will do this and it does not appear to be as easy in the long term as Oracle Lite.
Along with schema evolution, comes referential integrity. How does MobiLink handle this? Once again I will send you to Dr. Dobbs Portal. Oracle Lite uses table weights. It applies change to the tables in the order that the publication items are assigned a weight. So, all the number 1 items get applied first and the number 2 items are second, and so on. Three methods for applying weights are manually determining your FK constraints per publication item, use the API method assignWeights(), and finally, you can run the code that I have in this post to determine your weights.
Troubleshooting and Debugging
The better your resources are for troubleshooting issues, the less time it takes to resolve issues. I haven’t worked with the MobiLink product enough to identify how good the tools are for troubleshooting. I can however comment on Oracle Lite’s troubleshooting resources. Since I have started working with the product, I would have to say Oracle Lite’s documentation is probably the biggest improvement Oracle has made to the product. Starting with the 10g R1 release, Oracle has added tracing to the following:
GLOBAL
SYNC
MGP
MGPAPPLY
MGPCOMPOSE
In those 5 areas of the synchronization life cycle, I can set debugging to 6 different levels (mandatory, warning, normal, info, config, finest, and all). From that, I can select 6 categories as well (general, SQL, timing, data, resume, function, and all). Then finally, I can set this for all users or I can simply specify a list of users. I can do this on the fly through Mobile Manager and gathering the results I can quickly resolve the issue combined with the schema evolution, fixes have hardly any impact to the user base.
Oracle Lite has also added debugging to the client and SQL tracing of all SQL statements that are executed on the client. For the client, this is as simple as changing this variable in the polite.ini to OLITE_SQL_TRACE=YES. With the Device Manager, I can specify that I want to add some debug information for a particular user. I can then get the user to perform the action that is causing them grief, and with the Device Manager I can then pull the debug file from their device.
Administration
MobiLinks doesn’t have a user administration interface. You have to create your own and hook it into their application. So, on top of developing all the code to do your synchronization, you are going to have to spend some time identifying ways to administer the users. Oracle Lite has the Mobile Manager. If you are familiar with Oracle OEM tools, this follows the same conventions. From Mobile Manager, you can monitor syncs, get debug logs, monitor MGP, add and remove users, add users to applications (did I mention one mobile server can have many publications). Training support staff for trouble shooting is easy with Mobile Manager.
The Mobile Manager can be deployed standalone or on top of Oracle Application Server. Oracle Lite is an n-tier based enterprise solution. If you require the use of the APIs to create your users, here is a sample:
MobileResourceManager rm = new MobileResourceManager(con);
rm.createUser("USERNAME", "PASSWORD", "DISPLAYED NAME", "U");
ConsolidatorManager cm = new ConsolidatorManager();
cm.openConnection(con);
cm.setSubscriptionParameter("PUBLICATION_NAME", "USERNAME", "BIND_VARIABLE", "'bind value'");
cm.instantiateSubscription("PUBLICATION_NAME", "USERNAME");
Conclusion
If you fall under the following category, then you should be choosing Oracle Lite as your mobile solution:
Already using Oracle Enterprise Database.
Already have an application using Oracle Enterprise Database that has a business requirement to go mobile.
Have a J2EE or .Net application that you need to port to a mobile environment.
Required synchronization of high volumes of data and high volume of tables and database objects.
Reasons to choose MobiLink are:
Your enterprise database is something other then Oracle.
Lots of resources on the net. Web casts and other information available.
Final thoughts
MobiLink seems to be a good product and fulfills many areas of mobile environment. However, MobiLink does not seem to have an enterprise approach to mobile computing.. The MobiLink product requires a fair amount of coding before you have users up and running. Oracle Lite seamlessly integrates with Oracle and Oracle Application Server giving you an n-tier enterprise solution for your business. Over time the current draw back of Oracle Lite such as lack of documentation will improve. The technology appears to be solid and is applying the lessons Oracle has learned in the Enterprise. Looking at the total cost of ownership it appears at a high level that Oracle Lite could have a distinct advantage of a lower cost over the life of a mobile enterprise application.
