For many users, developing, deploying, and administering mobile applications can be challenging without the right tools and the appropriate infrastructure. Many enterprise-class relational database management systems (RDBMSs) were designed for client/server-based computing. Client/server applications typically assume that the user has a permanent connection to a server. For this reason, there is no local data store and no facility for working offline. A traditional client/server application can be modified to work in a mobile environment, but the code required to ensure that data on the client and server remains synchronized is considerable.
To develop scalable mobile applications, you must rely on services in the operating system and RDBMS to distribute and synchronize updates made on either the mobile client or the central database. The operating system and RDBMS should provide these basic features for developing a mobile database application: