PHP & MSAccess & OS?

[Kold]

Hello.

How tricky would it be to use PHP to access an MSAccess (2002) database?

Also, would the operating system need to be a Windows one?

I will only be needing to search it. A new database would get re-uploaded every so often.

Thanks for any info!
K.

[MarkR]

The easiest way would be using ODBC and the MS Access ODBC driver - this is probably free to use on licenced windows servers.

Failing that, you'd probably have to buy an expensive third party ODBC driver which might be available on non-win32 systems too.

I don't recommend using MSAccess for a web back-end in any circumstances - the driver is liable to problems like crashing, hanging etc. It would probably be better to write some sort of converter which loads it into another DB and access it from there.

Mark

[Kold]

Thanks.

Loading it into mySQL was one of the things i thought of, but it would end up with a lot more work for the user (or bandwidth depending on how i chose to do it) and i thought this would be easier if it was possible.

[Roger_Ramjet]

Yes, it would have to be an NT box for Access. Other than that, using access is about the same as using mysql. See this tutorial . However, Access has documented problems with concurrent updates and will break under heavy load, so it is not robust enough for a website that carries a lot of traffic.