title: Connecting to a MS Access database
body: <p>Someone asked me to do some research to achieve the following result, maybe you guys can help me out an suggest me some tips. </p>
  
  <p>We have a local server and there are different 'jobs' on it ( in a MS Access ) Database. </p>
  
  <p>Now we want to create a platform where other users can check their "job status" with different parameters ( field names etc ) from the MS Access database. </p>
  
  <p>I am looking for the best practice, how to connect to this database from everywhere in the world. I already did some research and found the following links:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://phpmaster.com/using-an-access-database-with-php/" rel="nofollow">http://phpmaster.com/using-an-access-database-with-php/</a>
  <a href="http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.odbc-connect.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.odbc-connect.php</a></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>How can I connect between a web-application and that MS Access database </li>
  <li>Can I update it realtime </li>
  <li>What kind of protocol does the servers has to support to intereact with a website? </li>
  <li>Currently the server can be reached from outside via a VPN connection.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>A piece of code I've already tried : </p>
  
  <pre><code>try{
  $dbh = new PDO("odbc:Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb)};Dbq=Custos_TAB.accdb;Uid=Admin");
  }catch(PDOException $e){
  echo $e-&gt;getMessage();
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I received the following error : "could not find driver".</p>