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I just finished up a week of teaching attendees at the Dev Connections conference how to setup and use mobile merge replication to sync data between their Windows Mobile devices and SQL Server 2005. As usual, I brought along my favorite teaching tool, my portable data center, to take attendees on deep dives of the 4 different tiers of my replication architecture. This time around, I changed the way my stress test harness works. In the past, my goal has always been to see how many Subscribers I could connect to the system at the same time. With the new test, I'm stressing the system to a much greater degree with my software to push the envelope in regards to how many table row changes I can make per hour. With an eye towards the stress testing system that has helped give iAnywhere's ASA database and MobiLink replication server a dominant market position, I built a similar test where the amount of data in each row changed is exactly 116 bytes each time. I think the iAnywhere stress test used 92 byte rows. I used 3 servers to create client load, 3 load-balanced IIS servers, and a separate SQL Server Distributor and Publisher. The results I got from my test harness performing 23,330 syncs per hour are nothing short of spectacular: Rows changed: 7,000,000 per hour | 168,000,000 per day Data replicated: 812 MB per hour | 19.4 GB per day Now check out how the IIS and SQL Servers where just chilling out throughout this test: IIS1: CPU: 5% | Mem: 216 MB | Network Utilization: .44% IIS2: CPU: 7% | Mem: 147 MB | Network Utilization: .13% IIS3: CPU: 8% | Mem: 170 MB | Network Utilization: .42% SQL Distributor: CPU: 5% | Mem: 2.15 GB | Network Utilization: .58% SQL Publisher: CPU: 17% | Mem: 4.25 GB | Network Utilization: 1% Not bad! Thanks to Loke Uei, we were also able to give away 300 copies of my new book that walks you through the construction of this scalable mobile merge replication system. Lots of Windows Mobile developers and IT Pros are now empowered to "mobilize" their organization's data out to mobile field personnel. Just as important, they can take the proof back to their respective organizations that this technology is build to perform and scale! I'm just getting started with this new test harness. Come to the Windows Mobile Partner Summit in December to see me push this system even further and break new replication records! - Rob

Okay, maybe I've been polishing chapters 1-4 for too long. The problem is that I keep thinking of more stuff to add that's critical to making this the definitive guide to mobile merge replication. Updates to the chapters include sections covering topics like ongoing maintenance and monitoring. There's only one chapter left to write which will be on programming the device to sync with SQL Server 2005. Additionally, this download includes a SQL Server backup file of the database used in the examples that you can restore to your server. The book is called "Windows Mobile Data Synchronization with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1" and it's being published by Hood Canal Press . Click on Chapters 1, 2, 3, or 4 below to download the PDF documents to getting started with Merge Replication. I appreciate all the feedback. Almost done! - Rob