[KLUG Members] ODBC Connection to MS Access

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>Hi all, I believe this is my first post to this list as I have watched
>this list for quite some time and found it very informative. I use Linux
>about 50% of the time for a couple of years now but I work in a NT
>environment which accounts for nearly the other half. Anyways here is my
>question.....
>I have a friend (really) who works in a NT shop who wants to setup an
>Apache web server on Linux but needs to access MS Access and MS SQL
>server from his Apache web app.'s using probably PHP or Perl. I did this
>some time ago using a program I believe it was called OpenLink which was
>an ODBC driver/manager program for Linux. It worked very well and I was
>able to create cgi apps accessing data from MS Access, the only problem
>was I think that program was a commercial app. Is this the only/best way
>to gain access to MS database apps from Linux/Apache?? Are there any
>more "canned" ways for ODBC access from PHP/Perl? I will do some
>searching on the web but I thought your list would provide some good
>suggestions for this.

There are several ways to go about this.  See -
ftp://kalamazoolinux.org/pub/pdf/dbaccess.pdf

I think you will find accessing the M$-Access files harder than the SQL
Server.  But both are do-able.  I would use PHP with unixODBC (which PHP
supports).

A step by step for using the OpenLink ODBC drivers can be found at - 
http://www.iodbc.org/wwwboard/messages/321.html

The openlink driver appears to be "free to use but restricted".