Very Computer

1. Why not use ODBC as inter-company inter-continental link?

I have been writing a fairly standard socket-based message passing
service for a multinational company.  It provides commercial grade
transaction-passing for a very narrow set of transactions.  It will be
deployed on a few hundred NT desktops in Europe and Australia, and
communicate with a transaction server in the US.  It will run on an
encrypted channel of the company's private network.

The target machine is operated by a completely unrelated vendor to the
multinational, and has a commercial unix database.  A friend suggested
just using ODBC between the companies.  I know very little about ODBC
internals, but have never heard of it used between companies over the
oceans.  Why not?  My first thoughts are security and reliability, but
if an adjunct "proxy" db were used to keep the desktops from actually
connecting to the US vendor's central db, would it provide commerical
quality middleware service?  For discussion, let's say that the desktop
transaction is a lookup: Here is a zip code '30309' - tell me what state
it is in.  The reply is: Georgia.  Another example is Order Entry, with
a reply of Order Number.

Of course, it has much lower performance than the stuff I'm writing;
probably as a result of being designed for wide system compatibility and
general purposes.  In this case, a performance cost of 100x might be
outweighed by ease of development - - the transaction volumes are only a
dozen per hour.  Only the active subset of the clients need to be
connected at a time - - 99% of the desktop application's purpose has
nothing to do with my target machine.

I know that we could use SmartSockets, MQSeries, CORBA, etc.  The idea
is to keep this simple and generic; no licensed software required on the
desktop, and as little as possible on the US server.

Please reply to my email address.

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