Distributed databases best practices

Please excuse if I'm in the wrong group...

We are currently doing a feasibility study on changing one of our systems from a lotus approach/dbase system to oracle 8i with a VB or web front end.

We are leaning towards a client /server interface because of it's richness, but then again a web interface would be easier to deploy and would allow quicker response time to the database.

The current system is located at 4 different centres across the country, without any direct network connection amongst them.

I would like to see one central data repository, but am worried about connection and data retrieval speeds.

We do need the ability to get financial information daily from all 4 locations and it would be nice to have the ability to sincronize core table data (item table, vendor table etc...)

I'm looking for good information (white papers, perhaps) on this subject, I have tried google and came up with a few ok articles, but am wondering if anyone here could enlighten me on their trials and tribulations.

Thanks alot,
-John Received on Wed Jun 19 2002 - 09:17:32 CDT