If you need to write to the DB, you're hosed, and caching locally will only make things more of a headache. If not, you might be able to improve read uptime, bu

If you need to write to the DB, you're hosed, and caching locally will only make things more of a headache. If not, you might be able to improve read uptime, but at a high cost. It's not easy to keep a local DB in sync with a remote that's only got 90% uptime, especially since it sounds like you have no support from the DBAs (they'd ideally need to set up replication permissions for you, and with that much downtime it's going to be a mess). As others have said, this is an organizational issue and the best way to handle it is to dig into the human politics.