asking for advice

Hi everyone,

i wonder if any one can give me some advice.

here is my situation, i have a central database server that contains all the data, running in an intranet, the client application, which is a thick client containing most of the biz logics is installed on a laptop,

i m required to develop a solution so that when the client application is disconnect to the database server (e.g. the laptop is taken away somewhere) the application can still work and when the client application gets connect to the database server again the application will be able to synchronize changes with the database and update all the changes. and i m not allow to develop a web-base application

my initial thinking is to use merge replication, however, i m conerning with the performance on the laptop if i have to install sql server on the laptop.

is there any other approach that can still achieve the requirement and have a better performance?

thanks a lot in advance.

You would be installing SQL Express on the laptop not the full version so you should be fine performance wise. We do this exact same thing and it works fine.

It takes a little longer for the laptop to load windows initially because it has to start the server service but once that is done there is not much of a performance hit. Unless of course you have a complicated database with tonnes of transactions per change on the client.

Martin