Servers can be anything from low level I/O data servers up to SQL and other types of servers. Two primary purposes of a creating server are:
Books are written on these two topics.
For example, how do you know that if you read ten values that these ten were all read on the same I/O scan and that some are not old and some new? How do you know that the data was not altered during transmission? With multiple clients, how do you grant access?
Communications bandwidth has always been a problem. Engineers have developed many ways of compressing data to send more data using less bandwidth.
Both of these factors must be considered when you serve any type of data to clients.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What experience do you have transferring data to / from remote locations? Many different ways: parallel, serial (such as RS232, RS422, RS485), industrial networks, other networks (such as token ring), Ethernet (such as sockets and FTP), intranet, internet, regular telephone, cell phone, radio, infrared / laser, microwave, and satellite.
What experience do you have with databases? We have used many types over the years. dBase (and then FoxPro) was the standard for many years. We have done a lot in the past, and still work with, many types of flat ASCII files. For example, a small amount of data in Excel or Access can consume 100 Kbytes. Whereas storing the same data in a CSV or XML file may only be 1 Kbytes. We try to do most of our database work in Excel and Access since that is most accessible to users. Are preferences are probably: Access, SQL Server, Excel, XML, flat ASCII and then any other.
See Also
Microsoft Links