Step 4: Creating the Publication

The next step in the synchronization process is to create a publication. This is achieved by selecting the “Publication” folder in the remote database.

A publication is a set of tables which are going to take part in the synchronization process. Although you may have 10 or 20 tables in your remote database to service the applications’ data needs, you probably will only synchronize 5 or 10 of those tables.

For this exercise we are going to setup our publication through Sybase Central.  if you have multiple remote users, you probably going to want to set this up through BATCH files or scripts so that you can easily create and deploy remote databases as required.

To define a publication, click on the Publications folder and from the top in the button bar we will run the wizard, to create a new publication. Give the publication a name, and call it “remote_pub”

Now we need to specify the tables we want to associate with this publication. If we wanted to, we can get more granular and specify only certain columns, or add where clauses to ensure we only synchronize certain rows etc.

For this exercise we will just sync all the data.

Once we have created the publication we need to define a Mobilink User by clicking on the Mobilink Users Folder and click the new wizard button to create the user – (same process as creating a publication). We will name this user “remote1”, and then subscribe this remote user to our “remote_pub” publication.  An easy way in Sybase Central is to simply click on the user and drag and drop him on the publication.

You will now see that the MobiLink user “remote1” is now subscribed to our publication called “remote_pub”. What this does underneath the covers is to tell the transaction log to start monitoring any changes made to the tables listed in the publication.

This is a very important piece of information, because it helps you to further subset information that is downloaded.

We are now ready to start synchronizing!

Before we set up our remote environment we must ensure our consolidated server can talk to our remote databases.

Quick Recap…

We have a consolidated server that is prepared with the Mobilink system tables

• We have a remote database that has all the tables we want to synchronize

• We have created the publication to define which tables will be synchronized

• And also defined the users which are allowed to synchronize data…