> There's absolutely nothing wrong, whatsoever, with having a public IP address on a production database server.
Umm, yes there is. Explain why you would ever need your database server to be publicly reachable. The only situations I can think of are if you're running everything off a single server, which of course is not relevant to this thread, or if you don't have a suitable gateway, which is rare and also not relevant to this thread.
