One of the most important features provided by personal digital assistants is the ability to synchronize device data with data on a user's PC. Unfortunately, current synchronization protocols have significant shortcomings that limit the availability, usability, and performance of synchronization. We present Edison, a service that leverages existing off-the-shelf ORDBMS technology to address these problems. Edison allows large numbers of users to synchronize handheld devices from any point on the internet with subsets of large, shared data sets. Edison supports this functionality while transferring the minimal amount of data to and from the device. We describe the implementation of the Edison data server and protocol, and show that Edison requires minimal overhead in terms of DBMS storage and additional time per synchronization.
展开▼
