>>requirements
The "problem" that I'm trying to solve is that we have a bunch of teachers who have students all over the place. They travel to several different offices. When they work on their student records, they only want to see "their" records, i.e. a subset of all of the student records. There is almost no problem with simultaneous use of the records, because there is usually only a single teacher per student.

I was thinking something like:

1. The data is kept centrally

2. The user logs in to a local program running on their own computer. They connect to the internet.

3. The user does a query, which finds all of their records on the central machine, and downloads them to the local machine. At the same time, it flags each record on the central machine, to say that it was "checked out" by a local user.

4. User slices dices, updates and reports to their heart's content. All this happens with a local copy of the data.

5. Once the user is done they push a button to "update" and the machine uploads any changed records to the central server. (it also sends any new records that the user has created.) Once the updated records arrive at the central machine, the flags are deleted, and the process can start over again.

The prerequisite of this is that the user would have to make an internet connection before working on their data, and be sure to upload the changes, before they work on the data a second time, so that everything is in sync.

What do you think?

---L