Pitching Sets

Here's a question and answer from this morning's email...

Q: Should we use SQL Anywhere web services or traditional application-level web services for production?

A: If your web service needs access to a SQL Anywhere database, there may be huge performance advantages to building it into the database. For example, if your web service reduces large amounts of database data into a small web service response, sending the large amounts across a client-server interface (web service as client, database as server) may be less efficient than having a builtin web service do the processing inside the server.

...especially if you take advantage of "set oriented" processing offered by SQL insert/update/select statements as opposed to "record oriented" fetch loops most development tools force you to use (yes, I know some tools hide the fetch loops, but as far as the database is concerned they are still happening).

SQL Anywhere web services are certainly ready for a production environment. The database engine has included an HTTP server for several years, and they have made a lot of performance and feature improvements to the web service feature.