Webmaster Forum / ASP / Database Access / February 2007

1. Yes you can access a SQL Server database remotely.
2. In all likelihood, it will be slower.  Any time you cross networks, a
delay will be introduced.  How this manifests itself can only be determined
by testing.
3. Whether it's hosted locally (to your application) or remotely won't
affect security.
4. You will find connection advice here:
http://www.carlprothman.net/Default.aspx?tabid=87#OLEDBProviderForSQLServer

--
Mike Brind

I'm doing this very thing for a customer.  This is the setup.

The web site is remote.  It make an HTTP request to an .asp page on a remote
server.  That server only accepts outside connectivity from the IP address
of the web server making the request on a specified port.  It calls a
default page which makes and ADO connection to the SQL server sitting right
next to it, calling a stored procedure, which returns and XML file, which is
returned to the original web server that uses an XLT to display the result.

The reason it was setup this way is because we took a commercial app that
the users use privately and allowed a portion of it to be displayed on a
public web server.  It's a job search type site like monster.com.

The only issue we ran into dealt with the application which on a daily
basis, removes all users in the SQL server that have access to its database
and recreates them.  They did this so other couldn't write 3rd party apps to
access their data.  We got around it by creating the user in the app.

Since we don't pass any credentials across the net, we didn't have a need to
make it an SSL connection which would have slowed it down.  The credentials
are passed only on the private network to the SQL server running in mixed
mode.

HTH...