Migrating a mobile application towards a distributed database for simplified synchronisation

Abstract: As mobile applications are often dependant on cloud services and connected through unreliable radio networks, application developers may find themselves implementing custom caching and synchronisation algorithms if the application is to operate flawlessly while offline. Relational databases have been the predominant architecture for persistent storage for a long time. With the emergence of the real time web, distributed schema free databases known as NoSQL have gained widespread adoption in recent years. This thesis evaluates the benefits of a distributed, document-oriented database over a relational database for a mobile business application that needs to provide offline usage. A prototype for an existing building inspection application invoking an embedded NoSQL database has been developed for this purpose. While the NoSQL database provides built-in replication capabilities for the mobile application, it is clearly limited compared to SQL when it comes to modelling highly structured data.