We use an application that utilizes SQL 2000. This application was written by a company that happens to be our IT support as well. We do have a wireless network installed and our users use thin client machines. We wanted to purchase tablet PCs for them and have them run as Fat Clients. Our IT company told us they do not support wireless Fat Clients because of a SQL fault. The reason they gave us is that if a wireless connection is interuppted even for millisecond, this will cause the application to hang and the user will be forced to go thru the login sequence again. According to them, thin clients do not have this problem because they run Citrix and it works differently (connectivity wise)

Does any one know if this is true or not? Is this a known issue regarding SQL and if it is, is there a fix or work around for it? Is this mostly how the application was designed rather than an SQL fault or perhaps the configuration of the wireless network

We'd appreciate any comments orsuggestions regarding this issue. We've tried to search the KB articles but we can't find anything regarding this particular scenario

I would say that the vendors statement is not entirely true.

If an application loses a connection to the server, the application
developer can easily test for this and prompt the user to re-connect.
Otherwise, if the application is not intelligent enough to detect this, the
application may attempt to use a tcp session that is no longer valid and
generate "General Network Errors" at the client. This is not the fault of
the SQL Server or the network library in MDAC, rather the underlying
network was dropped.

Thanks,

Kevin McDonnell
Microsoft Corporation

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