Now while some might still be reading the title and asking themselves why on earth anyone would want to use PHP to gather data from a Microsoft Access Database, in the real world this type of functionality does make sense. Not using Access as a Database for a website of course. But it could well be that a company has stored a lot of data locally on an Access Database, and that the data is needed for the company's new website. Any programmer faced with this kind of task will thank his lucky stars that PHP is capable of hooking up with an Access database, and through this can load the data in question over to a MySQL, or other, more suitable database.