I've been pleading for nearly 3 years with our IT department to allow the web team (me and one other guy) to access the SQL Server on location via VPN so we could query MSSQL tables directly (read-only mind you) rather than depend on them to give us a 100,000+ row CSV file every 24 hours in order to display pricing and inventory per store location on our website.

Their mindset has always been that this would be a security hole and we'd be jeopardizing the company. (Give me a break! There are about a dozen other ways our network could be compromised in comparison to this, but they're so deeply forged in M$ server and active directories that they don't even have a clue what any decent script kiddie with a port sniffer and *nix could do. I digress...)

So after three years of pleading with the old IT director, (I like the guy, but keep in mind that I had to teach him CTRL+C, CTRL+V when we first started building the initial CSV. I'm not making that up.) he retired and the new guy gave me the keys.

Worked for a week with my IT department to get Openswan (ipsec) tunnel set up between my Ubuntu web server and their SQL Server (Microsoft). After a few days of pulling my hair out along with our web hosting admins and our IT Dept staff, we got them talking.

After that, I was able to install a dreamfactory instance on my web server and now we have REST endpoints for all tables related to inventory, products, pricing, and availability!

Good things come to those who are patient. Now if I could get them to give us back Dropbox without having to socks5 proxy throug the web server, i'd be set. I'll rant about that next.

http://tapsla.sh/e0jvJck