[ale] Linux Frontend to MS Access

[Brian Pitts]

Warren Myers wrote:
> Anything that supports ODBC should be able to work

The problem with this as I understand it (and I'm not certain I 
understand it very well, that's why I'm asking here) is that there is no 
Linux ODBC driver for Microsoft Access (ie Jet) that has write support. 
MDB Tools [1] has an ODBC driver for Jet, but according to their website 
write support isn't implemented yet. Judging from their mailing list, 
MDB Tools development has stopped. Unixodbc's website lists the 
commercial ODBC-ODBC Bridge from Easysoft [3], "a client/server product 
that allows an ODBC application to access an ODBC driver on a remote 
machine", as the only option.

 > depending on what
 > he needs, you can do it with PHP.

Writing a web application that runs on Windows and thus can use 
Microsoft's DAO or ODBC drivers sounds like a possibility. The other 
possibility is to migrate the data to another database that both MS 
Access and a Linux database program can read and write to, such as 
MySQL. [4]

I'm not sure which (if either) of these is feasible or acceptable, but 
I'll find out. Until then, I welcome any further suggestions or comments.

-Brian

[1] http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.unixodbc.org/drivers.html
[3] http://www.easysoft.com/products/oob/main.phtml
[4] 
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/myodbc-examples-tools-with-access.html