Node or static page generation
What approach you want to use depends on the remote database and how dynamic the information is as well as how much data you expect to display.

If the remote DB is easy to work with and you don't need to do anything interesting with the data you might integrate with it using a custom module working directly against the remote database.

If the data needs to integrate with typical Drupal stuff (Views, Panels, Pages, Fields) then you might want to pull the data into nodes. This would still probably mean a custom module. I believe the Migrate module (http://drupal.org/project/migrate) could be a good help here.

How current the data needs to be is also a consideration. Should it checked for new content every time a certain page is visited or is it fine to run it on a cronjob in the background. Like every 3 hours?