The SymmetricDS data synchronization engine is open source software. You can have all the data synchronization functionality you want or need for free. Why would anyone buy it? Well, here is our “David Letterman” style top ten list of reasons.

Meet us at the National Retail Federation's Retail's BIG Show conference in New York City on January 13-16, 2013. The NRF is the voice of retail worldwide and the annual conference is attended by more than 25,000 top retailers. The four day event offers education, networking, presentations, and exhibits.

The professional version of SymmetricDS 3.2 was released, and it includes a lot of great features and improvements. Let's go through some of the most important ones first, and then I'll show you some of my favorite hidden gems.

Bridge data between databases with data synchronization by using channels to re-order data when the dependencies in each database are different. Each application can model its data differently, so a parent row in one database might map to a child row in another one. Instead of using data transformation to lookup and add dependent data, the order of captured data can be changed to match the constraints of the target database.

From time to time we are approached with the question of how to do initial loads of data in two directions with SymmetricDS, not just one direction. This feature is available in SymmetricDS and isn't hard to configure. An understanding of how initial loads work in general, combined with a few settings, is all that is needed. This article will walk you through a tutorial on initial loads in general and will then discuss the configuration needed to do a 'reverse' initial load.

For most of our large clients where SymmetricDS is playing a mission critical role in their organization, our customers take advantage of SymmetricDS Pro's out of the box capabilities to be load balanced. While SymmetricDS does a great job with hands off recovery in cases of hardware or infrastructure failure, most clients want as little downtime as possible. They simply don't want a single point of failure in their synchronization scenario. The good news is, with SymmetricDS Pro, load balancing is simple and straight forward.

SymmetricDS now has its web-enabled, fault-tolerant, database synchronization software available on the Android mobile computing platform. The Android client follows all of the same concepts and brings to Android all of the same core SymmetricDS features as the full-featured, Java-based SymmetricDS client. The client is designed to be referenced as a library to run in-process with an Android application requiring synchronization for its SQLite database.