Administration and Total Cost of Ownership

When evaluating database applications for mobile clients, you should ask these questions about administration and total cost of ownership:

• How easy is it to manage security for multiple mobile clients?
• What tools and built-in functions are provided for resolving conflicts when users independently update the same record with different information?
• Can the administration tools be customized easily to meet the specific needs of an organization?
• Do the tools take advantage of existing skill sets, or will the database administrator need to learn new procedures and programming languages to administer the database efficiently?
• Can the database administrator manage a multiple clients as a single logical group?
• How well are the administration and system-monitoring tools integrated into the operating system?
• How easy is it to deploy both the database engine and the databases on the client?