Fastest way to get thousands of db records to client in 3 tier?

[R. Alan Monroe]

In article <874qz22jah.fsf at pobox.com>, jjl at pobox.com (John J. Lee) wrote:

>> >Why not let the client ask directly if it is faster?

>> I thought that defeats the purpose of having 3 tiers. You'd have to 
>> update the client if/every time business rules changed. Unless I'm 
>[...]
>
>Why?  The client asks the client in terms of "business logic", the
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Not sure what you meant to say here?

>server asks the database in SQL.  If server and DB can communicate
>quickly, no problem.


Let's say I want to see all the tickets I worked on in the previous 
calendar year. The server can get this from the DB in 1 second. But if 
the server has to spend 30, 60 or more seconds getting those results 
back to me, the client, the system wouldn't be worth using, in my 
opinion.

I _have_ used systems that returned a subset of matching records to 
the client, and found it very uncomfortable. That's why in my system I 
want to scratch my own itch, and return all the records.

Alan