Sharing MySQL data with MyODBC - Database Design Manual: Using MySQL for Windows - page 159

database vendors, and the ability to communicate with that driver in SQL by the software
that needs to use the database.
As well as being used on Linux and with PHP, MySQL is able to interface to other systems
using ODBC. ODBC is a method of allowing a program to talk to a database. All the pro-
gram has to do is talk to the ODBC driver, which handles any specific requirements of the
database server. No matter what the DBMS, as long as the correct ODBC driver exists for it
then the application can talk to it.
Data Sources
The ODBC connection between your specific database and the software that is talking to it
is called a data source . You will usually refer to that data source by its name. All database
queries are sent to the data source, which uses the ODBC driver to talk to the database
server. Data obtained from the request is then passed back to the client software.
You can have many data sources on the client machine, and some of the sources can
point to database servers on remote machines. To differentiate though, they must all have
unique names.
Obtaining MyODBC
The ODBC driver that MySQL uses is called MyODBC. This can be obtained from the down-
loads section of the www.MySQL.com website which can currently be found at the follow-
ing link:
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/index.html
Figure 14.1 shows the page at the above URL. If you scroll down you will see the link to
MyODBC under the Official APIs section. There are usually three types of releases under
this section, a current working release, an old release and a release that is being tested. It is
usually best to go for the current, stable release which in the figure is production release
3.51. Click on the Connector/ODBC 3.51 link and your web browser will take you to another
page which allows you to select the operating system that you will be using MyODBC with
and finally download the driver.
Installing MyODBC Drivers
After downloading, double click on the MyODBC .exe file that you just obtained to start
installation. You will be presented with a screen as shown in Figure 14.2.
After reading the messages, click on Next on the screen shown in Figure 14.2. There are
no other options to choose in this setup so you can just click Next on the following screens
unless you want to read the other messages that you are given. When you get to the screen
shown in Figure 14.3, you have completed installing the MyODBC drivers.