Ok. I've been thinking about this long and hard. The plan is to do the following once a night (at midnight, when it's likely that nobody will be using the database):

1. On the local computer, use Perl and ODBC to copy the data out of the four tables in the database and export to CSV
2. Compress the CSV file with Compress::Bzip2 (if it exists. I haven't looked yet)
3. Upload the file to the web server with FTP.
4. use telnet to connect to the webserver and decompress the file.

I'll write some scripts to query the database on the web server with DBD::CSV. Unfortunately, the people who run the server won't install SSH, or MySQL or Postgresql. It's really getting quite frustrating. I think I'll just start my own web server in my office.

What do the monks think? I know that telnet and ftp aren't the best protocols to use, but I don't have much choice. The webserver is in another room in the same building, so I'm not too worried about passwords.