Good look on your surgery, and thank you for your insights.
Supporting authoritarianism to protect financial interests harms society in the long run - and you can't eat money nor buy a society pleasant to live in.
You wouldn't necessarily need an SQL frontend as it's readonly anyway, and there are multiple ways of letting SQLite access databases in S3 buckets, e.g. https://github.com/michalc/sqlite-s3-query
Supporting authoritarianism to protect financial interests harms society in the long run - and you can't eat money nor buy a society pleasant to live in.