Step 1: Prepare the Consolidated Database

Open the MS SQL Analyzer, and ensure that you connect to the database that you want to synchronize with. For the purpose of this exercise we will use the sample Northwind database that is installed by default when you install MS SQL Server.

Open the syncmss.sql file and execute the script against the Northwind database.

This script has now created all the relevant Mobilink system tables and stored procedures that will contain all the synchronization logic.

This is the only step you require to ready the consolidated database to synchronize data with a remote SQL Anywhere Server (ASA) database.

In very rare circumstances, some organisations do not allow the installation of additional database objects or stored procedures. In this case, we can still synchronize with these databases by using “Shadow Tables”. This topic is outside the scope of this article.

Step 2: Create the Remote Database

Launch Sybase Central

Start > Programs > Sybase >SQL Anywhere 9 > Sybase Central

You will see that Sybase Central has two components listed

Adaptive Server Anywhere 9   & Mobilink Synchronization 9

We will explore both of the options.

By clicking on the Adaptive Server Option on the left you will notice in the right hand pane a tab called Utilities, and within here you will notice a number of wizards that we can use to walkthrough to complete certain database tasks.

The first one that we will look at is the “Create Database” option. This will create a new blank SQL Anywhere database. For the purpose of this walkthrough we will use a location of C:\demo\remote.db

To run this wizard, we double click it. We are then prompted to specify where we want to create the new database, and we are going to specify a folder on our local machine (C:\demo\remote.db). The screens that follow this one allows us to specify various options such as collation sequences, page sizes, using integrated logins etc.

For this exercise we will click on finish, therefore accepting all the default parameters and options. As the database is created you will see it set the default collation sequence, page sizes, java in the database etc.

Once this is done, you will see it has created a new blank remote database and connected to the remote.db database. If we click on the “Tables” option you will notice that there are no tables in the database.