Posted by Adam on 08/11/06 14:01

On 8 Aug 2006 08:50:32 -0700, rcnews@gmail.com wrote:

>First timer here.
>Where's the best place to educate myself on how to use PHP in
>conjunction with Microsoft Access--good online tutorials, sites, blogs,
>etc...? I work at a small online grocery service that would like to
>develop interfacing between our databases with the web to allow
>customers/users to directly manipulate profile data and make orders
>that will filter directly into our database without manual entry.

Without getting into the Access/MySQL debate, it's perfectly feasible
(for a medium sized application). I ran Access with Coldfusion for
many years with no real problems.

Many of the criticisms of Access used to be related to how it
performed in a networked environment (arrrgh!). PHP connects as one
user (sort of) and many of the network table and file locking problems
don't seem to happen (at least in my limited experience).

Setting up and querying the ODBC connections can look a bit daunting,
but it's no more complex than MySQL. There are, however, a few
"gotchas" ...

1) Date formats. Access uses some pretty odd time/date formatting -
you'd have to Google around for the best ways round these. Time/date
functions have given me more grief than anything else.

2) Access uses Jet-SQL, which is slightly different to other
"flavours" of SQL. If you're familiar with it, then you'll be fine.
99% of the work in outputting from a database is in the design of your
SQL statement. *Don't* just cut & paste from Access's query builder
.... it's VILE! Unnecessary nested brackets about 20 deep.

I can't think of a single place you could go for help. Any PHP.NET
online manual is by far the best, as it's crammed with loads of
contributionsand fixes from users.

I'd say *go for it* - just give it a try!

Adam.

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