Help w/M$ Access

Heres the situation ...

I am trying to help a "friend/client" out with their website. They would like to show users their acct info via a page, easy enough. This account info is being saved to Access '95 via a third party app. My thought was to use PHP's odbc()'s to connect, query, etc. Did some surfing/research and found some tutorials on how to do that but they were all geared towards Access '97+.

I am _not_ familiar with Access! Maybe someone here could straighten me out on a few things. Is Access a db or is it just a front-end to a db? Some of the info that I ran across on the Net talks about creating user acct & pswds to Access in order to connect via odbc and then pointing this to MS SQL Server (as you can tell I am very confused about this). I thought SQL Server was another rdbms that M$ makes. Is what I am trying to accomplish even possible?

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

You should be able to just connect to access via ODBC. You will need to set up a DSN in order to do so. Don't worry about SQL Server, as you thought it is an entirely different DBMS. Is Access a real DBMS? That is debatable ;)

My thought was to use PHP's odbc()'s to connect, query, etc. Did some surfing/research and found some tutorials on how to do that but they were all geared towards Access '97+.
Is Access a db or is it just a front-end to a db?

Access is a database, but not a databaseserver like MySQL.

I thought SQL Server was another rdbms that M$ makes. Is what I am trying to accomplish even possible?

The MS SQL Server is a rdbms, but it is in comparison to other rdbms`s expensive.

I would suggest you (if I understood your wishes right) a hoster, which offers you a mysql database and the possibillity to use an odbc driver. That allows you to use the MySQL database in background and an MS Access Installation on your PC as the frontend.

Greetings