[dba-VB] Access data across the internet

John,

This is a good candidate for a web service. A web service allows you to
expose certain methods to client machines outside the network.

1. Basically in terms of servers you will need a web server and a database
server (one physical server is possible but two are better due to security
issues).
2. The web server exposes the web service application and takes care of
authentication to the database server. The web server is the only one that
is publicly accessible from the outside.

This saves you from having to set up VPN client software on the client
machines and also saves you from having to purchase hardware to run the VPN
on the server side.

Eric


-----Original Message-----
From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 6:11 AM
To: VBA
Subject: [dba-VB] Access data across the internet

I am looking at doing an application in C# that needs to be able to run on
user systems around the country, but manipulate data in a common location.
IOW employees can be anywhere, running this program on their machine, but
reading / writing data to a central server.

It is a fairly simple application in terms of the data, a hand full of
fairly stable and short list tables that feed combos, and a couple of "log"
kind of tables that document processes.  It would be nice to have access to
a fairly complex directory structure containing data files that need to be
imported by and exported from this program.  Again these files are small,
less than a thousand lines of data, fixed width or CSV.  I am looking at the
files now and the largest appear to be 80K or so.

I am thinking that a VPN tunnel to allow access to the data directories,
which are then mapped to a drive on the local workstation.  Some kind of
data store on the server, perhaps SQL Server Express. 
  A local data store to do the import into, manipulation / cleanup of data,
export back to files on the remote server directory structure.

I am wondering if you guys have experience in setting up this kind of a
server and application to work on such a server.

--
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com
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