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
Confidentiality should be agreed on in a sane manner.
That said - full strategic insight into the vision and what‘s done to achieve it and welcoming input will engage employees in a very productive way, but requires free flow of information.
Usually, the benefits outweight the problems _by far_.
The first geothermal wells in Germany have exhausted their heat gradient; after less than 30 years … so, unless you’re actually in Iceland or the Canaries or something similar, this might not even sustainable for even one full generation …
For people who love alternative history stories, the "Ring of Fire" series (starting with "1632", which you can get for free at http://www.baen.com/1632.html) is highly recommended.
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.