I have a need for an application to access reporting data from a remote database. We currently have a WCF service that handles the I/O for this database. Normally the application just sends small messages back and forth between the WCF service and itself, but now we need to run some historical reports on that activity. The result could be several hundred to a few thousand records. I came across http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733742.aspx which talks about streaming, but it also mentions segmenting messages, which I didn't find any more information on. What is the best way to send large amounts of data such as this from a WCF service?
It seems my options are streaming or chunking. Streaming restricts other WCF features, message security being one (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733742.aspx). Chunking is breaking up a message into pieces then putting those pieces back together at the client. This can be done by implementing a custom Channel which MS has provided an example of here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa717050.aspx. This is implemented below the security layer so security can still be used.