Rather than developing against the live production database, consider
developing the application against a test database with identical schema.
You can use test data or obfuscated production data for testing.

I spend a lot of time writing apps against sensitive data, and often have to
explain to clients that valid data is needed to test against.
If you want to limit access to certain tables just create a user with
disabled access to sensitive table and allow only access to tables they will
use.
If the tables that they need, have actual sensitive data in them, then
create a duplicate database with different user and change some data.
i.e.. if its salary then directly edit the duplicate database and change all
the names and passwords to random data.

My suggestion is to have a third reliable party to backup database change
the sensitive data and return with another database name.
Then just hand that database on cd to your programmer.

As a second thought if its only reading i.e.. reports then create required
tables and fields as views.