John

Great technical post, thanks.

If you do not agree with my point about refresh(), why not rebut it in the wiki? To me Refresh() is incredibly useful- especially in a fat client, data bound environment when the ability to refresh a subset of (say) 100 records is a blessing. Whether 100 records "is too many in a C/S environment" is unarguable because I guarantee I can dream up reasons why I need it.

If you have compelling arguments I'll listen, I love to learn, maybe you are right and there is a better way. Convince me.

>>on balance, a stored procedure offers more opportunities to improve performance. For example, in a stored proc, you can produce a number of intermediate result sets before returning the final result set. With RV's, you would have to return all of the result sets and perform the munging on the client. As far as the posted benchmarks are concerned, unless they were done under controlled/real conditions, they are suspect<<

In that circumstance, sure you'd be better off using SP. But I can quote examples with giant rows where a RV delivers far better performance than a SP. Everybody can come up with examples like this. Examples are not proofs, they can only be disproofs.

>>>>Using remote views requires less knowledge of the back-end syntax.
>>The fallacy of course is that if you are developing a C/S app, one needs to be knowledgeable about the back-end. As far as the syntax is concerned, it is SQL that is being passed to the the backend. That syntax is being generated on the client. If one is tasked with building a C/S s/he needs to know and understand all aspects of the system: both the client and the server.<<

I can't remember that point. I remember the point that use of RVs (and LVs) can make your app backend independent. This *does* matter, especially for broad appeal apps where buyers may have a corporate database standard. Faced with "lose the business" vs "use Sybase" on a big deal, the ability to demonstrate quickly using Sybase is a blessing.

Oops, now we're restating the stuff in the Wiki!

Regards

JR