Web Services with large datasets

[C P]

I'm designing an app that will need to run in environment where different
data is on different DB servers and OS'es (SQL Server, Oracle, Windows,
AS400 etc). My app will need to pull together data from a few separate
databases and then run some reports on the data. My original thinking was
that XML and webservices would be the route to go. I could have someone
provide a webservice that would give me some XML that I could turn into a
dataset to be analyzed to create the reports. This is great in theory, but
when I look at the sizes of the XML files, I'm not so sure. Webservices
seem to be better suited to passing around small datasets or scalar values.
How to people generally deal with this? Is the XML file size less of an
issue than it seems to me? Or, do I need to look at figuring out a way to
get a more direct connection to datasources in cases like this (i.e.
reporting)? I know on the DB end I can quickly switch providers, but the
SQL for one DB backend never seems to translate to a different DB backend,
so you're stuck modifying much of the SQL too.

Chris

 

[Miha Markic]

Hi,

One way would be to zip the xml file before transfering it.
Is this intranet you are talking about?

 

[C P]

Zipping may help, but I'm not 100% sure yet if this will be in an intranet
environment or not. I'm in the stage of determining all the technical
restrictions and options to try to narrow down some solution options. Since
much of this is pretty new to me on the detail level, I was just wondering
if there was a better approach than XML in a circumstance where you need to
move larger amounts of data.

Chris