Re: Reading an MS Access Database file on *NIX platform using PHP

On Sunday, August 24, 2003, at 05:31 PM, Giz wrote:

Access is a pc database. It doesn't run on unix. Why people insist on beating their heads against the wall in this manner I will never know. Ignorance I suppose. The alternative is to have your friend use a relational database and have a few simple forms that will allow him to insert/update/delete. Best of both worlds, and the open source/free databases mysql/postgresql are used on thousands of websites every day.

I share a low regard for Access, and I've got a set of standard forms/code I use to set up a nice interface to MySQL, and I showed it to my friend. He likes that, but there's a problem: He wants to be able to make changes offline, and then sync up. This isn't an uncommon desire... I've run into people wanting to do this before (with Excel spreadsheets, no less). And in fact, it's probably the most convenient way of doing things, as long as they're warned about certain dangers (overwrites from competing unsynced database files). There's a certain cumbersome nature about web forms and the time delay involved in HTTP transactions. So anyway, that's the motivation for using Access here. David Otton <phpmail@jawbone.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

Suggestion: go backwards. Set up the data in, say, MySQL with an ODBC driver, and use Access as a front-end onto that data (Access makes a good front-end for manipulating other databases). I've done this with SQL Server, but it should be possible with anything that can talk ODBC. He gets the interface he's used to, you get a database that can run under BSD. Of course, changes will be reflected in the site in real-time, which may be a good thing or a bad thing. Either that or export the data from Access in a readable format, and import it at the other end.

These ideas might work better; especially the latter. If COM doesn't work under UNIX and ODBC can only talk to FoxPro, Access, and other document (rather than server) oriented databases with the help of some special Win32 control panel/dll, then it would seem that the only way to do offline updates that are then synced would be exporting from Access in some standard format. But it seems somewhat odd to me that there aren't any UNIXy (PHP, Perl, something....) for parsing Access files. I know there's a few CPAN modules for Excel, but it's interesting that there's apparently nothing for Access. ~ == ~ http://weston.canncentral.org/