I have all my static objects stored in a sql server database, would it be so bad to open up read rights and allow people playing my game to download the dataset of objects directly from the server?  I do have a client/server app running on the server which is controlling all the positions, velocities, etc.  But I kind of dont want the app handling the static objects because the simplicity of the dataset.  Just a few thoughts would be nice.

I think you'll need to provide more info on exactly what you're doing and what you want to accomplish.

Ok i have a client/server game.  The client recieves every bit of information from the server including the position of all static objects.  To make it simple I am going to say the server has one sql table with 1 tree in it, when the client connects, it does a sql call to the database to find out the position of the tree, once its knows the position, it draws the tree on the client screen.  When I designed this, I had every intention of having the server application do the sql query and pass the information back to the client.  But now that I am actually doing the networking, I realized that the client performing the sql call works awesomely.  I guess the question is more for sql people like the pros and cons of allowing read access to the sql server directly in a mass multiplayer game, typically in the production environments I always had a webservice or other app that handled this.

I wouldn't do it. If you do, you are tying yourself to always using SQL Server, perhaps even limiting yourself to a particular version, and then there's always the security risk. It's pretty simple to create a wrapper webservice that simply returns the same data table, thus allowing yourself the flexibility to change how it all works at a later date without breaking everything.