I am a pretty big dude 6'2 over 300 pounds. So nothing gives me more joy than having heads turn as I step out of my Mini Cooper. I am feel like a super model, a veritable Cindy Crawford to the Mini Cooper marketing machine. Big Guy + Tiny Car = Match Made In Heaven.

My daughter and I last year drove the Mini Cooper over the Mackinaw Bridge with a few thousand other Mini Cooper drivers. These small cars are engineering marvels, not only cool looking, but super fast, nimble and so fun to drive. Especially motoring through the flexuous tree lined roads of Northern Michigan, with the top down with a cold Diet Mountain Dew, Ray-Ban sun glasses on, blasting Cheap Trick and Jeff Beck from every speaker, or is it just me that does that? I digress. What is even more amazing to me is that I fit very comfortably into this miniature mussel car made in England. For the record I have what my doctor calls, "A little bit of a weight problem" I am 6' 2" and weight a bit over 300 pounds - That is: 1.6 Meters 136 Kilos for the metric readers, or 21 Stone if you are still wearing a kilt or calling the Queen a "Wee Bonnie Lass." what can I say? I love food, I married a great cook, and I sit at my desk all day working, I am digressing again. Bottom line, I fit comfortably in that tiny car.  I feel this roughly applies to our question today. How much data can I fit from my hugely awesome enterprise Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service application into my tiny phone? In this story I represent huge and awesome.   

Firstly, there is no practical limit to the size of data that can fit in the Dynamics Field Service Mobile application. The underlying database is limited by the hardware's ability to read, store, index, and synchronize the data before failing to do so.  So the App doesn't limit the Database size, the phone does. So a primary consideration is what are the device limits? The devices have limits that need to be considered when syncing data to a mobile device. Our entire system is built to limit the amount of data stored for other reasons, not because we can't but because we shouldn't send everything.  The primary reason is bandwidth, not storage size. Even if I could have every account, contact, case, work order on my phone. Why would I? Each record synced takes bandwidth to sync changes. That bandwidth has an actual cost to it from the mobile carrier, not every company can get an Unlimited Data Plan. Additionally, data Synchronization imposes a waiting period in which the Mobile user needs to be online and standby for all the data transactions to take to Sync. 

We recommend Sync filters to be set up to limit the data set that would be sent and received in order to make the sync to happen quickly.  Typically sync filters are built to limit the data to the specific records the user will need to do the work assigned to them until they sync again.  No more and no less. So My work orders and bookings for today, all the accounts and contacts in my service territory, and all the assets associated to those customers, and my product catalog.  More records me more data to process on the client. Because our app works on Android, IOS, and Windows we have a wide variety of client processing power.  The system does not know the processing power of the users phone or tablet, and processing performance can vary greatly from device to device.  I have tested a mobile phone running 300k products, it was slow, my whole phone was slow, but ran it on the PC and it rocked.  So the amount of data is not a problem for the app but a problem of the mobile platform.  So understanding the mobile environment, the users use cases will help you determine the relative amount of data your system requires.  This is pretty easy to test and model on different platforms to find the ideal mix of Work Orders and associated entitles.