If you can provide a DSN suitable to open the connection from your local machine, you could use that database. If you have shell access at your provider then you may be able to use the DBD::Proxy modules to open a connection locally there and proxy it out so you can see if from your local machine. I would be sure to do this over a secure channel ie. ssh or the encrypting variations of the proxy and make sure that no one else can use the proxy otherwise you open up a connection for anyone to query your data. I believe the proxy modules can be set up to allow read only access which would mitigate the risk to a large degree on the remote end

The connection between the Proxy modules being read only from external. The Proxy's can have an encryption set up between them etc.