Use case: Mobile Application with offline first approach
One of Ashnik’s customers – a top Insurance company in Asia was looking to develop a mobile application with online & offline capabilities. The needs being:

• To enable the field agents to access their customers’ insurance related information for read and offline operations
• Subsequently, sync all the insurance related customer data, captured by the field agents while being offline, back to the data centre  – when the device goes online later

The Goal of the solution :
To provide client centric data to the field agents on the go. Using the existing legacy application source system to push data into their mobile devices with offline & online capabilities.
The Challenges:
At present, field agents rely on a web based application to get insurance related information of their customers. The same web application is also used to for new insurance application as well as to calculate premium details based on a customer’s age, health conditions and lifestyle. For each of these services, the agents need to be connected with application through internet. The upload and download waiting time was significant and intermittent network drop often resulted in filling up the same information again from start. The customer experience standards were dropping, as customers had to provide their details all over again for a new policy – as data integration from the legacy system to the web application was non-existent.
The Solution:
Ashnik proposed a technology stack to host and prepare the data for mobile platform comprised of Pentaho Data Integration, EDB Postgres and Couchbase Database Server, Sync Gateway & Couchbase Mobile Lite.
How it works:
All insurance related data resides in legacy AS400 systems and from there it flows to the enterprise data warehouse. This data needs to be extracted, enriched and transformed to JSON before loading on to Couchbase database. Couchbase is the primary source of data for the mobile devices – Couchbase Lite is used to cater the offline data at the client/mobile end. The Couchbase gateway takes the sole responsibility of secure data sync between Couchbase database server & Couchbase Lite at the client’s end to provide the online/offline capabilities.
Pentaho Data Integration was used for data provisioning from the data warehouse, data enrichment & transformation and loading into EDB Postgres. In order to maintain the historical trails of the data as it comes from the source system, Pentaho was used to facilitate the use case. On the other hand, we leveraged the features of EDB Postgres to generate JSON content from the database tables. Further, Pentaho was used to push JSON data from EDB Postgres to Couchbase document store using HTTP post to the Couchbase Sync Gateway. Also, there was a requirement to maintain the logging information of the JSON data pushed to the Couchbase server, this was handled using Pentaho Data Integration.
Apart from that, there was a need of Selective sync of customer information from the Couchbase database server to the mobile end. The field agents initiate a request to download selective customer information from the server. This request is received by Pentaho as a real time request. Pentaho’s real-time job using carte is used to cater the request and in response set the document property in Couchbase server to sync which then triggers a sync from the server to the mobile device.
Benefit:
This powerful technology blend of EDB Postgres, Pentaho & Couchbase successfully helped our customer achieve seamless integration between the legacy source data and their mobile application data.
EDB Postgres was used to generate complex JSON documents along with the high data volume for processing.
Pentaho helped integrate the legacy application data to mobile application in order to provide the perfect user experience. Pentaho Data Integration helped with the dataflow orchestration as well as to provide real time job facility to respond to high volumes of incoming requests.
And lastly, the Couchbase Suite did an exemplary job in ensuring a seamless two-way synchronization between online & offline capabilities for the mobile-based application.
– Saurav Mitra I BI and Data Integration Consultant and Architect, Ashnik

Saurav’s vast and global experience spans across Business Intelligence & Visual Analytics, Big Data Management, Data-warehouse, Data Integration, Data Migration, Data Profiling and Data Quality Assurance. Among the technology tools he has expertise in Informatica Power Centre, SAP (BI, BO, and HANA), SQL, Server, Oracle, MySQL and Teradata tools.