Replication solutions?

Hello everybody

I work at a company in Iceland and we have developed a 3-tier solution
written in ASP - Visual Basic - MSSQL2000, 4 companies are using the
solution almost constantly and accessing it through a browser. The
connection has never gone down (yet) so that it has affected our
clients but we are thinking of how be able to run the solution locally
at every place and then create a replication to a main server that is
hosted at our place.

My question is: Does it affect speed for the clients that are using
the solution or is there a better way of doing this?

The solution is a ticket sale system and our clients use it every day
and people that sit at home should be able to order ticket online.
Because of that we can't update the database every 5 minutes or 15
minutes because we don't want a double booking in the same seat.

Any help appreciated!

- Sindri"Sindri Mar" <sindri@.veldi.is> wrote in message
news:8ee9a793.0401090855.774e35cd@.posting.google.c om...
> Hello everybody
> I work at a company in Iceland and we have developed a 3-tier solution
> written in ASP - Visual Basic - MSSQL2000, 4 companies are using the
> solution almost constantly and accessing it through a browser. The
> connection has never gone down (yet) so that it has affected our
> clients but we are thinking of how be able to run the solution locally
> at every place and then create a replication to a main server that is
> hosted at our place.
> My question is: Does it affect speed for the clients that are using
> the solution or is there a better way of doing this?
> The solution is a ticket sale system and our clients use it every day
> and people that sit at home should be able to order ticket online.
> Because of that we can't update the database every 5 minutes or 15
> minutes because we don't want a double booking in the same seat.
> Any help appreciated!
> - Sindri

It's not clear from your description what the reason for considering
multiple local copies is. If the application is web-based, then it shouldn't
really matter where the clients are, assuming they have a good connection to
your web site. Right now you have one database to manage, but creating local
copies would create more administrative work, and replication can become
quite complex. By having one single central database, you should also find
it a lot easier to avoid duplicate bookings, because everyone always sees
the current 'real-time' data.

Having said that, if you have good reasons to consider local copies (such as
copying only a subset of data to the central site, while leaving any
confidential data locally perhaps), then replication can certainly do what
you want. It's a big topic, though, so you may want to post on
microsoft.public.sqlserver.replication to see if you can get some more
detailed advice.

Simon