In case anyone else is trying to do this:
What I did that completely solved the issue was to use component streaming to convert a zeos ZQuery for result sets and a ZSQLProcessor component to a string.
By doing this I could use the Zeos dataset components on my "Thin" client without a connection component.
i.e. I use them as normal, but instead of calling the components Open or ExecSQL, I instead use my own that do the streaming and send to the App Server.
I simply send the base64 encoded streamed components to my App server and then assign the connection after I stream it back to a component and then execute.
For updates, deletes, inserts I just send back boolean and a error string and for a result set I send back a Tbufdataset I saved to a stream after copying the result set from the ZQuery. I use a Indy tcpserver on the app server side and tcpclient on the client side.
It works incredibly well, only thing to keep in mind the indy components enable Nagel by default and because the amount of data sent for a streamed component is small the Nagle if enabled will really slow it down. With nagel disabled, you can't tell your executing all the SQLite SQL remotely on a LAN.
End result is a super easy to implement 3 tier client server application. no database dlls are needed on the client side, and this could easily be adapted to other databases instead of SQLite.
I should also point out this allows your sqlite db to run in wal mode since all the users access it are on the server device the WAL shared memory is not affected,
and you get greatly increased concurrency.
I attached a screen shot of the App server in operation.
The app server portion is to manage a "Mini" Managed File Transfer system that uses the same SQLite DB and has a Indy FTP server and a SecureBridge SFTP server sharing the same user auth tables and rules. The rules use GLOB pattern matching to do various things with the files after they have been uploaded i.e. Unix to Windows CRLF convert, move to other SMB UNC locations, forward to other SFTP or FTP servers etc .