How does ODBC work?

Quick answer: Just like printing! Install the database vendor's official "ODBC driver" on the machine where you are running your web server or desktop application. (The ODBC driver is directly analogous to a printer driver.) This process usually only takes about 2-3 minutes and is fully automated, but if such a machine is running Linux or Mac OS X (or even Classic Mac OS), the database vendor probably has not provided a well-supported ODBC driver, so you'll have a couple of quick options to consider:

• For some popular databases, such as SQLServer or Access, there are freeware hacks where someone stayed up late trying to figure out enough of the database vendor's protocol to get something working and then uploaded the code onto Sourceforge, or some company such as ORACLE released a free UNIX "developer-program SDK" that was downloaded by a guy in Indiana who Actually sold it for $10-$20 as some kind of ODBC driver. Good luck.

• For other databases, an obscure company presumably went to the database vendor, paid $100K to "license" their database protocols and then produced some kind of "commercial" ODBC driver that you can buy and hope they keep maintaining (even as LINUX, Mac and the database system mature around them). One company that did that, has made a lot of Progress by changing hands five or six times!

• Of course, the ultimate solution is to simply install a free ODBC OverDriver on the Linux, Mac or Windows machines that relay their database requests over the network to a stock Windows PCs or Virtual Machine running the background service called ODBC ROUTER. ODBC ROUTER, in turn, talks to the database vendor's official Windows ODBC driver. While the client-side OverDriver piece is free, the ODBC ROUTER itself costs about the same as a Chinese TV, even though this strategy also solves the other major problem of printer and ODBC drivers, which is eliminating the need to constantly maintain different versions of various ODBC "drivers" (and sometimes supporting network software) on every laptop and server in the network.

After the client-side driver and any ODBC ROUTER are setup, the PHP scripts or off-the-shelf apps that know how to use ODBC (like Excel, Access and FileMaker), are all ready to use your databases by making standard ODBC calls.

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PHP and ODBC