I feel your pain, unfortunately I have nothing reliable to offer.
Have
you considered moving the heavy lifting to a workstation, and just
uploading the result to the server?
That is an interesting idea. I suppose I could update the db on my
system at home, but getting the changes to the server's db sounds...
complicated. Some ideas:
It might be a good excuse to play with mysql replication, but that
would almost certainly involve talking my hosting company into making
some changes to their configuration and there's a good chance that
won't happen.
Another option might be having the update tool just spit out a mysql
script. That'd take time I don't have at the moment, but would
probably be the simplest solution.
Any other suggestions along these lines?
--Brad