Re: Ah, the old days
"You'd be surprised how unwilling some of the instrument vendors are to moving this DB onto a proper server in the datacentre!"
And I can see why.
The instrument sits on the bench here. As the instrument user I control it. What datacentre? Where? What extra cabling is needed to connect it? Who runs the data centre? Who has access?
Unless there's a specific need for an instrument to be connected to a network it should be capable of being used locally; the alternative is to introduce it into the IoT where, as we all know, the S stands for Security.