Can local intranet application (built on php) query mysql database stored in offsite location?

I have a local intranet application which runs off a basic WAMP server in our offices. Every morning, one of our team members manually syncs our internal mysql db with our external mysql db (where our online enrollments occur). If a change is made during the day on the intranet application, it is not reflected on the external db until the following day.

I am wondering if it is possible to (essent开发者_开发知识库ially) tunnel to an external mysql connection from say a wamp or xampp server from within our offices and work in 'real-time'.

Anybody had any luck or advice?

Yes

Replication enables data from one MySQL database server (the master) to be replicated to one or more MySQL database servers (the slaves). Replication is asynchronous - slaves need not to connected permanently to receive updates from the master. This means that updates can occur over long-distance connections and even over temporary or intermittent connections such as a dial-up service. Depending on the configuration, you can replicate all databases, selected databases, or even selected tables within a database.

If you use the external server directly, performance is likely to suffer. A Gigabit LAN might be a thousand times faster than your Internet connection - particularly the upload speed of an ADSL connection.

Just make your internal application use the database from the external one. You may need to add permission to the external server to allow connections from your internal server IP, but otherwise this is just like having a webserver and sperate db server that need to access each other.

Can't really tell you how to do this here - it all depends on your specific configuration, something that I would thing is a little complicated (and too specialized) to figure out on SO.