Comment by _flux

However, would those 10s or 100s of MBs be something web sites would just like to share in their entirety to the client to query as they wish? At least many commercial services would prefer to keep most of the data secret and even gain insight from the access requests.

But for a more open or a hobbyist project where minimizing amounts of data transfer is less important than minimizing the amount of doing more work (server-side code), then this seems like a decent solution.

It is also worth reminding that this solution only practically works for read-only databases.