>Tim,
>
>Thanks for responding. I agree, it sounds more like a 'thick-client, client-server' apps.
>
>Unfortunately, one of our competitors is using the approach, so we have some people who believe it might be a good solution. My question is this...do you really gain that much more performance in taking your business layer and having it reside on the user's desktop (as opposed to having a 'business' server?)
>
>Thanks,
>Kevin
>
>P.S. I like your quote at the end of your signature. I used to be a big Ayn Rand fan.

The reasoning behind multi-tier design is maintainability, reusablity and scalability. By creating business and data objects that represent the tables in your database, you should be able to maintain all of the code that manipulates those tables in one place. You should also be able to design a multi-tier system that runs on a single server and supports several thousand users.