Job for a Web service ??

[Venerable Bede]

Hi,

 

I have just spoken to a client who has an SQL Server 2000 setup in his office and would like people to be able to log into a website in the public domain and view some of these details.

 

At firat I thought about setting up a second SQL Server database on the web server and linking the 2 using the web servers database as a web back end.

 

I have recently read about web services/soap and was wondering if instead of using a second sql server I could create a webservice instead.

 

Is this a good/feasable solution? and if so can anyone reccomend a good starting point for a newbie in this field ?

 

Any Sites,Newbie books e.t.c

 

Thanks a lot:)

[Nerseus]

Why can't the webserver just communicate directly with the SQL Server? Creating a Web Service would be useful if there were a win32 application that needed access to the data or two or more applications (or various other reasons). Even if the web server and the SQL Server are on different domains, you can still connect the two together. I would definitely NOT run SQL Server and a Web Server on the same machine. Both want to take up a lot of memory and need to handle mutliple requests at the same time. A "fast" P4 server is only $3000 or so now, hopefully a client could swing that if they need an additional web server in addition to a SQL Server.

 

-Nerseus

[Venerable Bede]

Good point but the problem I have is that the client is not to keen on having a permanent connection to their local Intranet server.

 

They seem keen on finding another way but I dont really have the experience. This is why I was thinking on holding a local copy of the data and maybe updating it 2 or 3 times a day.

 

How this could be achieved is something else.

 

I knew I should have been a hairdresser.