I'm running Filemaker Server 7 on a Mac running 10.3.5, and am also running a few small MySQL databases on that machine.

Could someone tell me what my options are for having Filemaker 7 read from, and possibly, write to, the MySQL database ?

Try ODBC.

I found my way to Actual Technologies web page by googling the topic.. but it looks confusing.

How exactly does ODBC work ?

Are there any other options. ?

thanks.

in general, ODBC is a standard communication driver that u can use for exchanging data, retrieving, etc., from different database sources.

on ur FM CD, there is a dir "xDBC" where there are a few documentations and drivers there.

** At this time, FileMaker Server 7 Advanced cannot be used as an ODBC or a JDBC data source on Mac OS X. FileMaker plans to support ODBC and JDBC on Mac OS X in a future release.

Dang... does this mean that the drivers on the CD and the Actual Technologies drivers will NOT work with FM server ?

The following from MySQL will let you import data from MySQL directly into FMP via an ODBC connection. I've tested it in FMP 5.5 and 7.0 running locally on Windows and in 5.5 served on Mac but client on Windows. MySQL lists an OS X connector but I don't have access to an OS X machine so I can't comment on it

oops I forgot to add the link:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/3.51.html

and beware of this (though the instal worked for me):

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=4303

One option is to use PHP. Go to www.abtrakt.com, get the free shell script . Then you can do things like this:

php -r '$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'user', 'password');$db_list = mysql_list_dbs($link); while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($db_list)) {echo $row->Database . "n";};'

Just as Baloo says, you have to install the MySQL ODBC driver and use an import function in Filemaker to load data from MySQL.

If you want to put something into MySQL, you can consider using the "Execute SQL" script step and execute whatever SQL statements you desire. (for instance: "INSERT INTO table (fields) VALUES (values)", or: "UPDATE table SET field = value, field = value WHERE id = someidvalue", and so on).

Generally, all SQL statements supported by MySQL are possible to execute from within Filemaker.

Good luck with your databases.

Greetz,

Jorix