[dba-VB] Access data across the internet

Hi John

A well-proven method would be to read and write these files from/to an FTP server.
Another method is to store the files as fields in an SQL Server.

Both of these methods, however, may run into trouble meeting clients' firewalls and won't work at all if the server is off-line.

A novel approach would be store them at Amazon Web Services. This is incredible cheap and frees you from running a central server of any kind.

Finally, like Eric tells, the probably fastest method to setup is a web service - could be hosted anywhere.
The VPN method and shared drives I would only recommend for a corporate setup.

It could be interesting following your considerations and solution for the project.

/gustav


>>> jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com 28-08-2009 15:11 >>>
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