Networking between Canada and the UK

[mojof1]

I work for a company that has offices in Toronto and London, UK. We have oracle servers located in Toronto, and I provided an Access DB to the London team which queries from our Oracle backend in Toronto. However, while it takes minutes to run a query in Toronto, it would take numerous hours for the London team. We think it's probably because of the physical distance between them and the server. Are there any work-around for this?

I'm thinking, what if they are granted access to our local windows file directory, and have them open the Access DB from through the directory and run the query. Would that allow them to utilize the local resources in Toronto and eliminate the distance issue?

Would really appreciate some advice, thanks.

 

[bill001g]

You may have similar issues. You main problem is that you are attempting to read and write small amounts of data. Say you latency is 250ms round trip due to the distance. Lets say you read a 100 10 byte records 1 record at a time. This will take 100*250ms or 25 seconds. But if you were to read all 100 records at once it is now transferring all 1000 bytes in 250ms. Problem with database application is you don't know which records you need until you look at the first ones.

The normal solution for this is to run terminal server so that the processing takes place where the data is and only the results are transferred back. You can also use remote desktop but that is only a good option when this there are not a lot of users needing this.

 

[mojof1]

You may have similar issues. You main problem is that you are attempting to read and write small amounts of data. Say you latency is 250ms round trip due to the distance. Lets say you read a 100 10 byte records 1 record at a time. This will take 100*250ms or 25 seconds. But if you were to read all 100 records at once it is now transferring all 1000 bytes in 250ms. Problem with database application is you don't know which records you need until you look at the first ones.

The normal solution for this is to run terminal server so that the processing takes place where the data is and only the results are transferred back. You can also use remote desktop but that is only a good option when this there are not a lot of users needing this.

thanks for the quick reply
i know nothing about networking, so I'm just trying to understand - wouldn't the London user running the query on the Toronto server be kind of like through remote desktop? If it's a maketable query for instance, wouldn't the only time when data is transferred from Toronto to London be when he tries to copy over the table created by the maketable?

thanks again!

 

[bill001g]

It really depends how the db querys are written and how much work is done by the server and how much is done by the client. It really depends on how the person that wrote the app designed it. MS access is one of the worst offenders, it is designed to be run over a lan.

Since you are experiencing delays only from the remote location it means the application was not written to accommodate high latency connections. In theory they could write one but I would suspect yours is not.

It is pretty easy to prove have someone share their desktop and run the programs remotely. I suspect the person on the remote end will see exactly the performance a local user would.

Mostly it takes a different idea of how to work. Too many users want all the data on THEIR machine rather than using their machine as a remote keyboard and monitor.