CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This question isn't about Civi reports, but a question about an alternative.  For a couple of my clients where their reporting requirement were too complicated for any of the standard Civi reports, I wrote queries in MS Access that accessed the Civi database tables remotely.  It's easy to do and works well.  My question is - is there an alternative to using Access for SQL queries against the Civi tables?  One that could be run on the same web host as Civi is running?  PHPMyAdmin would do it, but would expose far too much of the tables to be safe.  Does anyone know of such a facility?