You will need the following:
Linux ( I’m running
RedHat 9.0)
PHP
Apache
UnixODBC
MDBTools
INSTRUCTIONS
1) Download the UnixODBC RPM, found
here. I installed unixODBC version 2.2.5.1.
rpm -ivh unixODBC-2-2.5-1.i386.rpm
2) Download the MDBTools rpm, found
here. I installed mdbtools version 0.5.1.
Read limitations!
rpm -ivh mdvtools-0.5-1.i386.rpm
3) Download the MDBTools ODBC driver rpm. Again I installed version 0.5-1.i386.rpm.
Read limitations!
rpm -ivh mdbtools-odbc-0.5-1.i386.rpm
4) Add the mdbtools driver to your unixODBC config.
Create a new text file. NON-LINUX user: Beware do not do this on windows as you might get werid new lines, use vi.
[MDBToolsODBC]
Description = MDB Tools ODBC drivers
Driver = /usr/lib/libmdbodbc.so.0
Setup =
FileUsage = 1
CPTimeout =
CPReuse =
NOTE: The driver may be in /usr/local/lib/libmdbodbc.so.0. This happens if you build from source and use the make install command. The RPM puts it in /usr/lib.
Now install the driver using the file you created. This is called a template file.
odbcinst -i -d -f template.file
5) Define the datasource name. This is done in the /etc/odbc.ini file. So pull up this file in vi or another text editor and add the following lines.
[Dogs]
Description = Microsoft Access Database of Dogs
Driver = MDBToolsODBC
Database = /var/data/my_dog_db.mdb
Servername = localhost
UserName =
Password =
port = 5432
That’s it you should now have an odbc connection available. I will demonstrate using php, this assumes that your php is compiled with UnixODBC support, the version that ships with Redhat 9 does if yours does not then you can learn how
here.
So I will write a quick php script to query my dogs database and print out the names and weights of my dogs.
$myDB = odbc_connect(”Dogs”,”",”");
$query = “select name, weight from dog_list”;
$result = odbc_exec($myDB, $query);
while (odbc_fetch_row($result)) {
print “Name = ” . odbc_result($result,”name”);
print “
Weight = ” . odbc_result($result,”weight”);
}
If you get a php error that says odbc_connect is not a function then see if you have php-odbc installed. Do rpm -qa php-odbc. If you see php-odbc returned then you have it if not install it., the rpm is available on the redhat discs.
Limitations:
- As of the time of writing this entry MDBTools did not support write access to the mdb files. This was fine for my purposes as I was reading data in and sticking it into a mysql database.
- There is a bug in MDBTools v0.5 which does not allow you to query tables or columns with an underscore. This was a bug I hit early on, but it has been fixed in new version 0.6 but that has not been released as of the time of writing this article. So I recompiled the 0.5 source code with the fix from the 0.6 CVS repository. I have bundled it into a 0.5 release and have the two rpms mentioned above here:
mdbtools-0.5-1.i386.rpm
mdbtools-odbc-0.5-1.i386.rpm
I would check the
official download site before using my hacked version as I’m sure this bug will be fixed in 0.6 (plus rumor has write access will be present as well).
References:
Using UnixODBC from command line
Installing MDBTools