>Hi Vlad-Georg:
>
>Here is a little more info, maybe you can give some guidance.
>
>Some clients will be on the WAN and others will be dialing in through their ISP's by mapping a drive to where the data resides. Not sure if the WAN uses high speed lines or not.
>
>If I go the C\S route I'll be transferring the results of SQL queries, in whatever format SQL7 uses to send them back to the clients. If I go the internet route, I'll be sending back HTML or possibly XML from the web server to the clients browser.
>
>Thanx,
>Charlie

Charlie,

thanks for the extra info.

1. A C/S Solution (Internet or not) is the right direction for this
   kind of job.
2. There won't be any serios penalty if you will use the SQL Server 
   output to generate HTML files compared to the direct output from
   SQL Server. Another great benefit of this solution: no need for an
   extra client software at every of your clients (only the normal 
   InternetExplorer), and as a result no nightmares with software updates,
   customer support and so on. You would even be platform independet 
   (PC, Mac and so on) as long as you don't use something else then 
   that HTML Tags which are compatible between different browsers.
3. The ideea of using XML is great, it's the future, so it may be the
   best investition of the project budget.
4. internet would also give you a very consistent application for
   all your users, not some of them over the WAN others over lines
   from ther ISP and so on. Such configurations develop after some 
   time to real headaches.
5. with internet you have an open technology, it would be easy 
   to change your database to another one (like Oracle) if the 
   performance of your sql server will prove to be insufficient.

Conclusion:

- the best way to test the performance is to create some
benchmark scenarios, one normal C/S and the other with 
internet technology. Even so you won't get an bullet proof
result, there are too many factors outside of your control 
(like what's going on on the ISP lines or WAN lines), but
it would be better than nothing.
- my advice is to use the Internet Way. Besides the performance
issue, you have only advantages, see the above paragraph.
- don't forget about the security aspect of the whole job. Even
if you don't use the internet approach you have to think about 
it.

Hope this helps, feel free to send me further questions.
It's really impossible to say more about performance, only
your benchmarking will give you a clue, hopefully a little 
more ... :-).