Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Sharing MySQL data with MyODBC
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It's Not Just For MySQL
As you probably realized before you bought this topic, databases are immensely useful
things. They can provide real-time statistics of webservers, store the whole contents of a
website or product catalogue for easy updating, provide management information, produce
mail shots to clients, and the list goes on.
Just because all of your data is stored in MySQL does not mean that that is where it has to
stay. One of the beauties of MySQL is that you can share the data between not just multiple
users but multiple applications as well. A common use of MySQL is to power database-driven
PHP websites, but that is not the end of the matter. Although PHP and MySQL are often seen
working together, do not think that you are confined to using just PHP for MySQL websites.
MySQL have provided standard database drivers which allow you to use MySQL data with any
program that can talk to these drivers. While your MySQL database is serving your webserver,
there is nothing to stop it also providing data obtained from your website to populate mail-
shots in Microsoft Word, or driving other web application tools like ASP and ColdFusion.
More Standards
If you have been in the computing industry for some time, you may remember the prob-
lems that used to occur when you were setting printers up. Before Windows, every person
who wrote software had to customize their software to make it compatible with their pro-
grams. Buying a printer could often mean hours of configuring and guessing to get it to
work with your program. This changed when printer drivers started to be used. You then
made your software talk to a virtual printer device, and it would print without having to
make any real changes to your software. All the printer manufacturers would need to do is
to produce drivers to make their printer work with the virtual drivers, as opposed to driv-
ers for every piece of software that needed to print.
The same concept of drivers has been applied to many aspects of computing, and on
Windows systems, databases can be used by other programs by means of ODBC drivers.
Open Database Connectivity
Open Database Connectivity (or ODBC) is a method of sharing data between databases and
other applications. This is done by means of ODBC drivers which have been written by the
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