unorthodox use of PG for a customer

Hi Everyone:

I'm going to throw this internal customer request out for ideas, even
though I think it's a bit crazy. I'm on the brink of telling him it's
impractical and/or inadvisable. But maybe someone has a solution.

He's writing a script/program that runs on a workstation and needs to write
data to a DB. This process also sends work to a batch system on a server
farm external to the workstation that will create multiple, parallel
jobs/processes that also have to write to the DB as well. The workstation
may have many of these jobs running at the same time. And there are 58
workstation which all have/use locally mounted disks for this work.

At first blush, this is easy. Just create a DB on a server and have all
those clients work with it. But he's also adamant about having the DB on
the same server(s) that ran the script AND on the locally mounted disk. He
said he doesn't want the overhead, dependencies and worries of anything
like an external DB with a DBA, etc... . He also wants this to be fast.

My first thought was SQLite. Apparently, they now have some sort of
multiple, concurrent write ability. But there's no way those batch jobs on
remote machines are going to be able to get at the locally mounted disk on
the workstation. So I dismissed that idea. Then I thought about having 58
PG installs, one per workstation, each serving all the jobs pertaining to
that workstation. That could work. But 58 DB instances ? If he didn't
like the ideal of one DBA, 58 can't be good. Still, the DB would be on the
workstation which seems to be what he wants.

I can't think of anything better. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in Advance !