Database – How to create a large sample database

Exposing a database isn't really a giant issue compared to some of the other services that are often exposed to world+dog... except that it's a complicated system with a lot of potential vulnerabilities, including permissions escalation. I would make sure that you don't expose the database to public queries and run with SSL required, etc. I would say it's possible, but yes, you should be paranoid and you should maintain a separate database install for the public facing one. If your company's not willing to pay the licensing costs for that, yeah, skedaddle.

From the customer/support side, connecting directly to the database might be an issue if the customer's ISP blocks certain types of ports or traffic.

In a SaaS model, what you'll generally want your programmers to do is to write an API that can be queried from the application. APIs of this nature typically operate over https and provide data back to the application in the HTTP response. Added bonus: It works from anywhere where the web works, it is VERY easy to cache result sets using memcached or other caching technologies to reduce load on the db server, and http auth is pretty well supported and tested.

I would investigate upgrading to 3.2.0.1. There are a number of enhancements to the selects and being able to turn features on or off. Here's one I would look at http://wiki.phpmyadmin.net/pma/Config#DisableIS as well as creating some custom selects in ShowDatabasesCommand

However 3.2.0.1 requires PHP 5.2 or better and Mysql 5.0.15 or better.