I didn't read every single post in this thread but from what I did read, I noticed that no one suggested SQL Server on the Azure cloud. I briefly had a chance to dip my toes in it and was surprised at how extremely simple it is. While .Net did provide a neat API for dealing with Azure storage and other Azure resources, as far as I could tell, SQL Databases were quite trivial to work with. You could use all the normal providers in tandem with ADO from VB6 almost exactly as you would with an SQL Server instance on a local network.

This is by far the easiest solution he could pursue. With an Azure account he could get something simple working in a matter of minutes and with no more or less code than any other SQL Server client application, and he doesn't need to learn anything new if he already knows how to write SQL Server client applications. It's literally the exact same code. The only difference is the connection strings being used.

You guys should have suggested this first. It's almost insane not to suggest this.