I think we've all wondered this at some point in our careers. It's something you should never do. Off the top of my head: 1) Security (as has been beaten to d

I think we've all wondered this at some point in our careers. It's something you should never do. Off the top of my head: 1) Security (as has been beaten to death here) 2) Interface versioning. If you expose a generalized SQL interface to your consumers directly, good luck ever making a change to your database schema. You'll have no idea whose workflows you break. This high coupling becomes very painful very fast. 3) Abstraction. The way data is stored is often not the way data should be surfaced. What about application layer data integrity, things like that? This would require the frontend client to have far too specialized of knowledge as to how the backend works. 4) Optimization. How do you optimize for queries you don't control? Someone will craft something that can bring your database to its knees under load without even trying to.