This paper discusses our experiences of designing and implementing a pure Java database proxy server with a JDBC compatible driver for intranet/Internet database application development. In particular, we present a shared database connection strategy and flexible caching facilities to address the scalability problem. Web clients with the same access privilege can maintain their logical connections with shared physical connections to the database. Thus, not only a large number of users can be entertained by limited physical resource, the connection cost is also not indulged for each individual client. Web clients can also express their cache requirements explicitly in the JDBC protocol so that a large number of clients can be served with improved response time. The effectiveness of such strategies is demonstrated through a set of experiments.