Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC

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by MichaelF on April 10, 2007 04:05pm

In cases where business applications have been built on open source databases, it may be necessary to connect other Windows applications, such as Microsoft Access or Excel, to these databases for reporting or business intelligence purposes.

One potential application of this process is to use Excel as a front-end for data analysis.  Data can be pulled from views or tables and then further analyzed, graphed, and the like.  Even pivot tables can be used to create even more powerful reporting solutions.

This how-to walks through this process using Excel as an example application.  Although in this example, the MySQL and PostgreSQL servers are running on Linux, the steps are no different if the software is running on Windows.  These steps are:

1.         Setting up authentication
2.         Installing the ODBC Drivers
3.         Configuring the data source
4.         Importing the data.

Attachment: excerpt_linux_in_a_windows_world.pdf