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The Twitter ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Twitter, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

With the Twitter ODBC Driver accessing live Tweets, Followers, Messages, Searches, etc. is as easy as querying a database.

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Natively Connect to Twitter Data in PHP


The CData ODBC driver for Twitter enables you to create PHP applications with connectivity to Twitter data. Leverage the native support for ODBC in PHP.

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Twitter into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Twitter-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Twitter data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

All tables require authentication. You can connect using your User and Password or OAuth. To authenticate using OAuth, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can register an app to obtain your own.

If you intend to communicate with Twitter only as the currently authenticated user, then you can obtain the OAuthAccessToken and OAuthAccessTokenSecret directly by registering an app.

See the Getting Started chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Twitter by calling the odbc_connect or odbc_pconnect methods. To close connections, use odbc_close or odbc_close_all.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Twitter Source","user","password");

Connections opened with odbc_connect are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the odbc_pconnect method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC Twitter Source","user","password"); ... odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the odbc_prepare function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Tweets WHERE From_User_Name = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Twitter Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Tweets WHERE From_User_Name = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('twitter'));

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Twitter Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT From_User_Name, Retweet_Count FROM Tweets");

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the odbc_fetch_array function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Twitter data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT From_User_Name, Retweet_Count FROM Tweets"); while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){ echo $row["From_User_Name"] . "\n"; }

Display the result set in an HTML table with the odbc_result_all function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Twitter data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Tweets WHERE From_User_Name = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('twitter')); if($success) odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are Twitter-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.