Dear John:
There are pros and cons.
Why add the traffic to your network of a file that doesn't change (or does
it? Are you heavily developing the application with releases daily?) Save
the network's bandwidth for the data. However, checking whether a local
copy is the latest version and downloading the latest version only when it
changes can be automated.
Do you have a separate file server, or are you going to load up the database
server with this, affecting application performance.
User's will have to wait for the application to load each time. They have
to wait for the server's HD to act on a request (and it may be busy) plus
wait for the transfer over the network. Instead, it could be on the local
drive, a much, much shorter wait.
So, you can save your network bandwidth and server performance for the
things that cannot be done locally. If the software is changing, use
techniques that check for the latest version and download over the network
only when necessary.
Having just one copy of the database on the server is tempting. It sounds
more useful than it probably is.
Tom Ellison
