Long story: I need to connect to mdb stored on a separate windows computer from php running on apache2 on linux. I guess odbc is the way. But the only available driver, libmdbodbc, seems to be buggy, dying randomly at odbc_fetch_row after successful odbc_exec - and taking php with it. Moreover, I'm not sure how well it handles concurrent access to the file - it might have just been designed for exclusive access only, I can perfectly imagine that being the case.
It would be better if there was some way to proxy odbc. I mean, there is a good enough ODBC MDB driver already at the windows computer and ODBC is standardized, so shouldn't it be possible to setup some kind of "redirect all odbc requests to COMPUTER_NAME:DATA_SOURCE_NAME" data source on linux computer? Is it possible?
If not, what are my options? Continue with libmdbodbc and try to figure out what causes the crashes? Try other drivers - which ones? I only need to read some data - maybe I can "link in" access tables into some other database and then access them through that other database driver? (This is possible in access itself - you can "include" tables from other odbc sources).
Migrating to other database is not an option - I have to keep backward compatibility.