Sometimes we deploy applications behind customer firewall and we need read only access to their DB for debugging issues as sometimes their IT people are not SQL savvy. We want to bundle our application with some web based application that will expose the database and allow us to fire adhoc SQL queries and show their output in HTML table. We dont want to write home grown code and we can bundle Java/JSP based applications.
Our backend is Oracle so we need a solution that can connect to oracle server and expose it over the web.
If you want the database behind a firewall, and believe me, you do want your database behind a firewall, see if you can have a VPN for going directly into the box. Once you are on the VPN, you can use whichever management tool you currently use for managing the database. So if you use SQL Server, you can connect via the VPN, and use Enterprise Manager to manage the database. Oracle probably has a similar tool, although I’m not that familiar. While having a VPN does incur an extra cost, it will probably make things many times easier.