I’d spent some time trying to connect to a staging site’s mysql database from a site running local in DevKinsta through an SSH tunnel. I was able to connect to the database via ssh with terminal or with my MySqlWorkbench, but I was never able to get the locally running site to connect to the db for development. I spent a day on chat with Kinsta being told it should work but in the end even they seemed to admit, it doesn’t work barring some solution which they were unaware.
Continuing to think to solutions for using a shared db. Is it possible to connect staging to a separate cloud db, also connect to that db from local, and then have the contents of the cloud db promoted to Live when the site is promoted from Staging to Live?