The business trend of growth in the number of users, offices and locations is increasing the distribution of data. When faced with increasing distance between users and a desire for even faster access to data, IT departments face a choice:
- They can centralize applications and rely on the network to deliver applications to the users. This simplifies application development and control, but requires ever larger hardware investments, or
- They can decentralize and move applications closer to the users. This reduces reliance on the network, but adds the challenge of connecting distributed applications.
While the press touts the speed of the latest processors and incredible bandwidth of the Internet backbone, fast machines and high-speed connectivity between company locations is realistic only for the largest enterprises.
For smaller businesses and for connections to remote offices like point of sale (POS) locations, centrally hosted applications are not always viable. Instead, applications must move closer to the users. This increases application reliability and user satisfaction, but requires a mechanism to share data so that all users see consistent and timely data. Pervasive DataExchange automates data sharing between Pervasive PSQL powered applications.
Typical scenarios include:
- Loading data from a production server to a reporting server for offline access. This allows the database load from complex reports and queries to not disrupt the operations of the rest of the users, increasing productivity and satisfaction.
- Real-time sharing of inventory data between warehouses. This gives each warehouse manager visibility into inventory at the other warehouses.
- Nightly download of sales data from point of sale systems to the home office server and upload of price lists from the home office server to each point of sale. This gives management at the home office nightly sales reports and the ability to easily implement price changes.
- Data synchronization for mobile sales associates who have customer management applications on their laptop computers. This allows customer data updates to be shared across all sales associates and with the main office.
