How to read MS Access backup .mdb files using PHP?

Recently I have has a challenging experience with integrating MS Access backup files (.mdb format) into my own MySQL database. That was part of small web application for integrating MS Access with cloud services.

After a couple of failed attempts to parse to .mdb file using pure PHP I had to conclude that this is not stable solution..

An alternative option I found is to use utility “mdb-tools”, which has a bunch of CLI commands for parsing .mdb files.
So, using PHP function shell_exec() I did a trick and solved the problem.

If you still don’t sleep, then you probably interested why am I telling this boring story?… :D

To know this read the rest ;)

After I solved this tricky challenge, I come up with an idea to create composer package and simplify life of other developers..

You can install this package like this:

composer require mdb-tools/mdb-parser

Also you need to install “mdb-tools”:

apt-get update -y
apt-get install -y mdbtools

In your code, with this package you can do things like this:

use MDBTools\Facades\Parsers\MDBParser;

$parser = MDBParser::loadFile(‘/path/to/file’);

//see table names…
$tables = $parser->tables();

Above code will fetch list of tables.

If you need to parse some table you can do like this:

//parse data from one chosen table...
print_r($parser->selectTable('some_table')->toArray());

Links:

I like to talk, so please contact via my linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleksii-fedorchak-web-developer/

You may find more about this package here:

1) Documentation: https://mdb-parcer.tech/
2) Github: https://github.com/OleksiiFedorchak/mdb-tools
3) Packgist: https://packagist.org/packages/mdb-tools/mdb-parser