We upload sales transactions from our stores to the headoffice server. We are currently using DTS (SQL Server Data Transformation Services), but we planned to replace it with Microsoft Sync services for ADO.NET, since this seems to be Microsoft's preferred solution for this type of setup, and we want to follow the standard (which I hope will around for a long time). Here are the details of our installation and planning. I am looking for some tips, especially about whether Sync Services is right for our solution.
Situation
Each store has a third-party EPOS system that stores sales in the Microsoft Access 2000 database, which we can access. Our headoffice database is SQL Server 2005, but will be updated to 2008. Headoffice is not in a VPN with all the stores, but we can open our firewall for the IP addresses of the stores so that they can send data directly to SQL Server. The stores are always connected to the Internet via ADSL, although they lose connection and we do not want to lose data about sales. We only download transactions from the store - definitions do not need to be downloaded.
Current solution
We created a Windows service that runs on the store’s PC. This service downloads the DTS package from the server (which contains all the download details) and launches it in the store - and this will download sales to our server. We chose DTS because it is free to install MSDE. We cannot use SSIS because this will require a SQL Server license in each store. Another reason we chose DTS is because the download details (that is, which tables and fields to include) are stored on our headoffice server, so if we need to change what we can do this centrally and not you need to install something new in stores. This is not a showstopper, but it would be nice to have this ability in our new solution.
Potential Solution - Microsoft Sync Services for ADO.NET
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