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I need to pull data from MS Access 2007 (both mdb and accdb files) for a website written in PHP 7. The pages don't need to be dynamic or interactive. They just need to present data stored in the database.

Local development environment: Windows 7, IIS 7.5

Online server: A2 Hosting, Linux (CloudLinux Server release 6.9), Apache/2.2.34

The ADOdb webpage for Access says "Windows Yes, Unix No". I presume this means I can use ADOdb to connect to Access in my local environment, but not on the online server. I suppose I have the following options:

  • StackOverflow has some questions on this (1, 2, 3) with answers that give code for connecting to Access in PHP. Although the answers don't say so, I am guessing that that code will only work in Windows because if it were that easy to connect to Access in PHP in Unix, then ADOdb would do it! So if I'm right about this, then this is not a workable option.
  • The PHP Manual has a page on Database issues that says PHP can access Access, but it seems to only apply to either running in Windows or "running PHP on a Unix box and want to talk to MS Access on a Windows box". So this also does not appear to offer a workable solution for running the website online on a Linux server.
  • Extract the parts of the database needed into something else that can be accessed in Unix, such as CSV files, and use that as the database for the website. If I do this with CSV, I suppose I don't need ADOdb, but would just use fgetcsv(). This is an inelegant solution, but may be the best thing to do if there's not a way to access Access directly in Unix. (I could use MySQL instead of CSV, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary overhead.)
  • Run the pages on my Windows machine using ADOdb to access Access. Save the parts of the pages that come from the database as separate HTML segment files and include() them when the pages run online. (The script could detect which environment it's running in and if it's local, then access the database, and if online, then include() the HTML segment files.)
  • Move the online website from Linux to a Windows server, so PHP can access Access directly using ADOdb.
  • Convert the entire database from Access to something else, such as MySQL. This is not practical at this time, although that may be an option in the future.

Have I understood my options correctly? I've listed them in what seems to me to be the order of preference, so unless someone suggests otherwise, I guess I'll go with the third one (extract to CSV, use fgetcsv(), no ADOdb) since the first two won't work.

Thanks for your help.

NewSites
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2 Answers2

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The main problem is the ODBC driver. The {Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb)} comes with Microsoft Access or the Microsoft Access Database Engine, which are both Windows-only.

However, there are alternate ODBC drivers that work on Unix and unixODBC. A popular open source one is mdbtools, which is limited, but can be used to connect Access to PHP on unix using PDO and ODBC. There are also commercial alternatives that are more fully featured.

Once you've got that working, it shouldn't be a problem to use the ODBC driver in PHP. Note that on shared hosting, this might not be possible.

Alternatively, you can use a php-jdbc bridge with UCanAccess. This might still be all-open-source and more fully-featured than mdbtools, but is more complex to set up correctly.

Erik A
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You don't need to convert "the entire database" from Access to use Mysql, just the tables. You can then link them back into the Access database using the MySql odbc connector and so long as the table names are the same you won't even notice the difference, all your forms, queries and everything will work.

You would then have MySql server running on your local machine which, if you create a user with the right permissions and port forward through your router (directing traffic from port 3306 or whichever port you assign to your server, to your machine) and allow the traffic through your firewall, your website can then access, read and write to your database.

If you want to query the database from php mysqli_query will work just fine. Most websites that run from data run using MySql, so this is a future proof solution too.

Stuart
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