SQL Compact To SQL Express Real-Time Merging/Syncing

Question

I have an application that currently uses SQL Compact Edition as its database for capturing realtime data. Some of my users would like to write their own applications to query and report against this data while it's being captured by my application. However, SQL Compact edition runs in-process with my application and therefore does not allow outside processes to connect to it.

I'm considering using an approach to replicate this data in real-time to an outside database service provided by the user (SQL Express or standard SQL Server) that they could then use to query/report against while my application continues to write to SQL Compact.

Any recommendations on the best approach for this? I've read a bit about the Sync Framework, but it appears to be more targeted at batch sync-ing, whereas I need to sync in (relatively) near real-time.

I'm curious if other folks have run into similar scenarios and how they have addressed this. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you're going to have your users install SQLExpress on the machine that is already running SQL CE, why not get your "real time" application to write directly into SQLExpress? Surely it's only a change to a connection string?