Hi, gang...

Someone out there will either think this is a good idea, or will think I should be tossed in jail...

We have 500 users who get a piece of manufacturer data once a month. The data is both internal shipment and retail sales data.

Some get small pieces of data, and pull it down via FTP every month. They're happy with what they have.

Some get much larger pieces of data, so much so that they have to receive CDs.

Obviously, an on-line solution is needed. But in what form?

We have a 'host' that runs at corporate, which processes transactions from the field (also using FTP). The idea I had, crazy or not, is that when a remote user who wants to run a report against a large historical data file would have his/her 'front-end' app send nothing more than a query expression string to this same 'host', which would run the SQL statement based on the query, and FTP the resulting recordset back to the remote (which would be polling a folder on the FTP server, waiting for the 'host' to actually send it).

Kind of a 'poor-man's client server, but it seems like it might be effective for our needs.

Anybody ever think of (or actually try) this...(or think I'm a moron for suggesting?)

Thanks in advance,
Kevin