Re: Like I said...

I said yucky on stored procedures because a) they are not in your native 
> language (I know that SQL2005 has .NET, but that is new)

That's not truly a bad thing, many notions are simpler to express and understand in SQL and stored procedures than they are in whatever language the client/middleware are written.

Of the clients/middlewares in my immediate surroundings I can find Delphi (of course), C/C++, Java, C#, VB (old & .Net), Progress, WinDev... each using a variety of "standard" libraries/beans/assemblies with their idiosyncracies, terminologies, dialects and datatypes...
In the end, SQL and DB is the only place where everyone understands everyone, in a clear, unambiguous way, right from the start.

Even when discussing data exchange over XML, everyone quickly falls back to describing data and its constraints in SQL terms (not null, primary key, foreign key, join etc.) because that's common ground, kinda like the english language -- and probably also because no human seems to be able to speak XSD fluently for long :p

> b) it is all SQL based and the things you can do are very limited

Not a bad thing either. If you have to write complex data manipulation code server-side that SQL can't handle, odds are you're doing it wrong anyway :)

and c) they are a pain to update (not like copying a new exe).

Copying an exe is only a fraction of the update complexity, the real complexity is in validation, deployment on hundreds of machines, updating config/security files/rights, etc. rinse & repeat for all the customers and their specific environments. Sometime self-updating EXEs are possible, sometimes you have to setup and test deployment scripts,
have them validated on the various hardware setups, etc.

By comparison, DB (or Citrix) updates are performed on a "single machine", in an environment that can protect you from fatal mistakes.

Can you access regular $50 USB scanners via TWAIN in an app shared like that? I'm not trying to make a point, I'm actually curious as this has been an issue for us in the past with regular TS and Citrix... 

http://support.citrix.com/kb/entry.jspa?externalID=CTX816193

Image scanners are not supported directly, though this has never been a practical limitations are they are rare, and usually have to be tied to local applications for usefulness (such as OCR).
The cases where we encountered them had PC clients running the app via Application Mode, so that was not a bother.

The are options that are available is someone requires remote access from a severely locked down network (port 80 out non-binary only). 

base64 encoding would go through that just fine too :)

Properly designed, the app is self maintaining by sending it's own updates to the clients. Again, you can only do this with middleware - you can't really transfer large files with a database-only connection.

Our application had such a facility built-in from the start, but over the years, it has become more and more impractical, as end-users accounts have less and less rights.

Nowadays, it's not rare when users don't have enough rights to overwrite/delete/create a ".EXE" file (or .DLL or .BAT or...), so we've learned to live without any auto-update facility... Usually the only customers where auto-update is still allowed are the small ones -- where there aren't enough clients to make autoupdates really useful :p -- those with large IT droids services have it forbidden, updates have to go through some centralized update/validation layers.

Eric
.

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