SPSS and PHP/MySQL Integration

Question

I apologize up front for the broadness of this question, but I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions/pointers.

A friend's company uses SPSS for statistical data, surveys, etc. They'd like to be able to slice and dice the the info via a web interface. I have no knowledge of SPSS, so there may be a simple web front end, but being a PHP/MySQL guy, I wondered if SPSS data can be exported in a way that MySQL can import or PHP can parse. Then I could build an AJAX front end to return queries in real time.

The idea would be a results table that changes when you make selections like "Gender: Male", "Age: 20-25"... each change would update the results in the browser.

So...

1) Can SPSS accomplish this with some kind of front end?

2) Can the data be easily exported in a generic format?

I just want to know if I'm on a fools errand before I talk to my friend's boss about ideas.

TIA. Don

UPDATE: I had a meeting at my friend's company to discuss more specifics. It sounds like the SPSS data is stored in MS SQL Server, so I'm thinking that I could connect directly to the data if I can see some kind of schema logic and write my own web front end against it.

Alternatively, I may be able to do a scheduled data dump of the data into another format.

Answer 1

SPSS has ODBC capabilities, as does MS SQL. Using ODBC you should be able to import all the appropriate tables to your MySQL db and hack away. A generic file dump (SPSS can export to a variety of file formats) would also work, but just includes a few extra steps.

In SPSS the gui for data export will be different depending on the version. Here is an example setup: http://www.indiana.edu/~statmath/stat/all/odbc/4.html#4b

Answer 2

http://www.spss.com/smartscore/

In addition, it appears that SPSS has an available API to make the SPSS information available to other apps. Assuming you could get a connection to the SPSS system, it'd be a matter of CURLing the information back and forth (a web service) Aside from the XML brain damage, this is one of the best ways to get two non-similar systems talking to each other.