Moving lots of data

Hi guys,

I was wondering if there are any 'best practice' techniques for sending large amounts of data through a web service.

When I say large amounts of data, I mean gigabytes of data, not MBs.

I realize there are other protocols that might be more suitable (such as zipping the data and FTPing), but I'd really like to keep this as a web service - because it gives me a lot more control and security.

Any thoughts?

Steve

This paper suggests that SOAP may not be not the best method of moving very large datasets .. such as in climatic modelling.

See also here ..

Thanks,

That's interesting to read - annoying though. I'd love to use a web services interface to pass the data. I can understand the arguements about parsing XML, bandwidth, etc, but were't web services supposed to be about transmitting data as well as application calls?

Looks like I'm going to have to look at some form of FTP system...

Steve

You can use SOAP to pass data pointers (not the full dataset which would be passed through another channel).

See 3.3 in this paper .. again on grid computing.