The Man has cooked up a poor design. It breaks normalization of the database, creating synchronization problems and providing a definite security problem to replace a speculative one.

The solution is dependent on the RDBMS, but starts with providing several levels of privilege in db access to correspond to the cgi groups.

If you can't talk him out of his notion, you may be able to devise an implementation in terms of slave db's mirroring a master copy.

After Compline,
Zaxo