Connecting to “non-standard” databases can become quite an interesting task. A while ago I wanted to run some queries on MrExcel’s Message Board, which runs on a PHP / MySQL environment.

Getting the ODBC driver wasn’t a problem, just go here (There used to be a MyOLE driver, but I guess it’s not supported anymore). It was filling the values that was a challenging task.

Here’s a screenshot of what the ODBC config page looks like:

The server name was kind of easy. It turned out to be the same URL as the ftp address. Then, there was the chase for the username and password. I have to admit that I finally restored to cheating, modifying some of the php pages so they would print them to the page, to see what the database was *really* using, because for some strange reason, the ones that we had were not working.

After that you should be able to get a list of the available databases in that server.

When you have that working you can use it just as you would any other ODBC connection. Here, for example, I got a list of the last 10 posts and who wrote them.