Marcus wrote:

> All,
>
> I am currently doing some investigation into ways of allowing clients to
> query a data over the net, not through a web browser. We currently have a
> client base of about 250-300 concurrent users, all connecting over the
> internet to our central processing application. The client application
> currently reads a local MyBase xml file for reference data. This data has
> no more than 2500 records. This has worked fine as the users have
> downloaded the MyBase file via an FTP site every day to get the latest
> data. However this file is about to be increased to over 60,000 records
> with an expectation for this to increase (double) later in the year.
>
> What I would like to do is have a Firebird database sitting on our server
> and allow the client to query it directly over the net. Has anyone done
> this before? What pit falls must I look out for? I'm just after some
> experienced guidance on this :0)

I have tried it. It depends a lot on the speed of connection, and of
course amount of data transferred (so be careful about your select
queries and use where clause wisely) - but you already know that.

Slow connection can give your application slow response to user
commands, so you may consider using separate thread to do DB queries.

You may also want to take a look at ZeDeBee, simple secure IP tunnel,
that can compress and/or encrypt the data. As far as it tested it works
great, here's the URL:

http://www.winton.org.uk/zebedee

Artur Anjos wrote a good "Using ZeBeDee with Firebird" guide, and it is
really easy to set-up.

HTH

Milan Babuskov.