What you'll need is Open DatabaseBase Connectivity or ODBC for short. I use iodbc on my linux boxen to connect to odbc databases and it works quite well. Note that under heavy load access is quite likely to fail catastrophically, taking all your data with it.
For simple reads or imports it's pretty good, but for parallel access involving reads and writes, you should migrate your data into a real dbms, like postgresql, which is included on most all redhat distros.
