SQL on Internet

Hi,Some of the users on my network will start using a sql database which is located at another site,they will use internet explorer to access the database,my question is will this slow down the internet for other users?

Thanks

It really depends on the 1) number of users, 2) bandwidth of your connection and the 3) amount of data being accessed and the 4) frequency of access.

The first two points are pretty obvious. The third point needs to be clarified. By data being accessed, I really mean the amount of data being RETURNED by the queries issued by your users. Even if the remote database is gigabytes in size, your only worry will be the size of the result sets. So for example if you have 50 users accessing a 1GB remote address database, but only requiring single address results of say 1KB, the speed of your internet connection will not be an issue. The bottleneck will more likely be found in the processing power of the remote database server.

So in summary, if the result sets of a reasonable size, you have not got an inordinate amount of users and your internet connection is not running on a 56Kbps line, I don't think you need to worry about your internet connection.

We are have a 128k digital line which is not sufficient at the moment,and the number of users is growing by the day.What they actually do is to load data (data capture) into the database and occasionally search.

Sorry for adding another question,but is there any software I can use to see which user is using a lot of bandwidth (if someone is downloading something and hence using up most of the bandwidth in a windows environment)

If all that your users are mostly doing is data capture, this is roughly equivalent to filling in a form on a website. In addition if the searches are done occasionally and do not return 100s of KB of data there should not be a problem. I think other uses of the internet e.g. web browsing/downloading will cause more problems due to the size of the available bandwidth.

The answer to your question on monitoring users' bandwidth really depends on the management features present on the device(s) controlling your internet path. If you let us know what kind of firewall/proxy server you use we may be able to give more specific advice.

The firewall and proxy are all setup on suse linux box

Check out PRTG Traffic Grapher . There is a free edition available for download.