how large of a dataset is practical?

[sde]

i'm about to attempt my first multi-tiered application and i'm wondering just how practical large datasets on the server app would be.

 

i'm dealing with about 800,000 customer records. ... just your standard contact information.

 

i'm just trying to get a concept on how this will work with about 26 clients maintaining data.

 

is that too many records to be efficient in a dataset?

 

i suppose i should just try it, but i wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts on the subject.

[Robby]

You can create a stored proc to do your paging, so that each results set returned is only as large as your page size. (let's say 50)

 

You don't want a result of 800,000 records that's for sure.

[sde]

yeah, after 50k records, it was using 100mb of memory.