Hi Craig:

DTS is tailor made for these kinds of problems. Why do you want to use web
services? Though web services will work here , they were made to solve a
specific kind of problem - that of interoperability.

Thanks,
Mujtaba.

Hi Craig,

I think I agree with Mutjaba's response.  To answer your questions,
however, here goes:

1. will it be significantly slower than DTS ?
<answer>  It depends.  To do this via WS you need to transfer the data
completely before you can begin processing any of it.  DTS is capable of
working a row at a time, but over WAN, direct connecting via DTS can
introduce latency issues that make determining the answer to this question
complicated.  Have you considered using secure FTP and processing the files
received (dumps) from each of your sites locally with DTS?
2. can it handle uploads of 1000s of rows ?
<answer>  Yes.  But the more rows involved, the more
memory/serialization/deserialization lag you will be able to measure.  The
volume of the data, in bytes, will be significantly larger in XML - so if
your lines are low speed, packet size constrained, high latency, etc, you
may see performance issues.
3. how do I upload the data ? do I use a dataset as a parameter to a web
service function, and send the 5 tables like that ?
<answer>  If you don't intend on having to support non-microsoft partner
sites, and you can keep the version issues under control (version of .NET,
version of Dataset, etc) then yes, you could do this all at once in a
dataset.
4. it is possible (and reliable) to get Access 2002 to consume a web
service ?
<answer> Access isn't set up to consume web services.   However you can
write a program in access that calls a COM exposed class that calls a web
service...  if you follow where I'm going here.

I hope this helps

Dan Rogers
Microsoft Corporation