Question

My boss wants me to create a desktop application with a database that is accessible via the Internet. The database is used to store information taken from a TCP server, but that is not my question.

so far on my research, I found shared web hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting and Amazon RDS to be possible choices. The only interest I have is the MySQL Server included in the given package.

I think for a simple application a regular shared web hosting is enough, merely because the database is consists of 10 tables and records won’t likely exceed more than a thousand records.

But my question is, is it possible to directly connect a C# application to a MySQL instance from a web server? And if it does is it secure? It will be storing vital information such as credit card numbers, and member information and needs to be up all the time.

Answer 1

You can easily connect to a MySQL database from any computer as long as your firewall do not block port 3306 on the database server. However, I strongly discourage you from doing so since you loose control over the clients.

• Each client needs to store the database connection somewhere (or fetch from some kind of server)
• You need to be able to update the MySql connector on all clients
• You get very little control over the data access.

Instead I would introduce some kind of data access layer that the clients would use. You could for instance use WCF Data Services or build your own very simple data layer (let the clients send SQL queries and return the proper result) using WCF.

Both those options lets you use any technology behind (you can even switch database server without the clients noticing).