Re: Newbie question

David Cressey wrote:
> There is value in avoiding round trips to the server.
>
> With regard to keeping the client and the database in synch with regard to
> data constraints (database constraints?),
> there is another alternative. Allow both the client and the database to
> inherit the constraints from a common source.

The constraints can in theory change at any time though, so how does the client keep up-to-date with these changes? To be totally safe it would have to check with the central constraint repository before everything it does that could be affected, which would be a massive overhead.

It could just check occasionally and hope that no relevant changes have been made in the meantime, but this doesn't seem totally satisfactory.

The other option is that changes to the constraints are pushed to the clients in a kind of replication scheme, which could be made transaction-safe. In effect the clients become mini-DBMSs partially replicating from the central DBMS.

It does sound like a good idea to have clients share the database constraints but the devil is in the details.

Paul. Received on Fri Jun 24 2005 - 02:05:14 CEST