Hi John,
>
>Well, you can *see* the pregnant pauses. The fact that very large datasets get passed across the wire has the expected effect. Check out http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/28/143420.aspx and note the reply from the MS rep at the end about "scalability".
I found the part "If you need a local copy of a large table, select it into a Jet or MSDE database and manipulate that. These engines are designed to handle bulk storage..." even more telling...
It might "just" come down to a deployment issue for totally static lookups.
But seldom changed and often read data ?

I can think of a few approaches to enable "browsing" in C/S environments, like loading only PK and sort order and always asking for "paged data" to display - if C/S is done for security reasons mostly it should work. Still, not really C/S "best practices", but doable.

>Sure we could put it in a local access or MSDE table, but that would leave a huge question: "WHY?"

Because it makes technical sense <g>, and perhaps having some mechanism
to handle such issues in .net alone might give you a [selling] edge.

regards

thomas