Databases are not large, typically tens of GB.

I don't know if docs are zipped prior to being embedded in the database. If not that might be a good way to improve file transfer over relatively slow connections. It seems like it might be a common situation, I wonder whether SQL Server has any sort of compression option built-in to its transport mechanisms...

The provider already supports remotely accessing the database via the public Internet. This works reasonably well except when large documents need to be extracted and viewed at the client sites. These days I don't think latency is an issue unless the connection is going through an undersea link, or (much worse) via satellite.

>Hi Al,
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>How big is the database in total?
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>Are the documents zipped in the database? In our app, we zip documents and unzip at the client end. That should reduce the neccesary bandwidth.
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>How large is the distance between the different sites? If limited to less than a 1000 km, a single database server might be sufficient.
>Your app otoh, should be optimized to have limited calls to the SQL server through.
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>In our app, one of the clients is 3000km away from the database with reasonable performance.
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>I can see this work, but it depends on the chattiness of your application, the stability of the internet connection, and the number of users involved at each site
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>Wallter,
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>>>At that low bandwidth at the branches, having a connection via Citrix would be the way to go and only have one central server. Trying to replicate over that low bandwidth will be trouble for that data volume potential.
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>>Yes, it turns out the solution provider isn't willing to support replication over low bandwidth, so it's going to have to be some sort of remote access setup.
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>>Embedding documents in the database doesn't happen every day. They might go for a while not doing any, and then have to put in one or two dozen.
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>>Do you have any idea of the efficiency of replication in this sort of scenario? If a 1MB document is embedded, how large of a transaction log entry does that create - I wonder if there's significant bloat.