Introduction to Remote Data Service

Remote Data Service brings database connectivity and corporate data publishing capabilities to Internet and intranet applications. With Remote Data Service, you can:

• Bind data-aware controls to data from remote servers.
  
  
• View, edit, and update live data from a Web application. (For more information about updatability, click here.)
  
  
• Take advantage of a transparent, client-side caching architecture. This boosts performance by retrieving large result sets in binary formats and caching data on the client system, avoiding expensive data refetching and resulting in fewer roundtrips. Such performance improvements are especially noticeable for data access across the Internet.
  
  
• Use familiar technology to implement Remote Data Service. Because you implement Remote Data Service with familiar technology ù off-the-shelf visual controls, HTML, and Microsoft® Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript) ù Remote Data Service integrates seamlessly with existing Visual Basic applications, letting you transport them to the Web.
  
  
• Partition your application into three tiers. You can use familiar languages such as Visual Basic, Visual C++®, and VBScript to build business logic into encapsulated objects. These middle-tier business objects can receive requests from front-end clients and Web applications and communicate with back-end database components such asMicrosoft SQL Server through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).
  
  
• Use Microsoft ODBC and OLE DB technology. Remote Data Service uses these technologies to handle all data similarly on the client side, regardless of its source. This eliminates the need to use targeted client-side drivers for each data source. This also means you can easily modify Remote Data Service applications to suit different network and DBMS configurations.
  
  
• Ensure secure access to corporate data via Secured Socket Layer (SSL). (This is an optional feature to use with Remote Data Service.)

In addition, you can use Remote Data Service with other Microsoft technologies, including Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0 and4.0 and Microsoft Transaction Server.

See Also For more information about how Remote Data Service applications work, see "Understanding Remote Data Service Applications."