Access Adobe Experience Manager Data from MySQL in PHP
You can use the CData SQL Gateway and ODBC Driver for Adobe Experience Manager to access Adobe Experience Manager data from MySQL clients, without needing to perform an ETL or cache data. Follow the steps below to connect to Adobe Experience Manager data in real time through PHP's standard MySQL interfaces, mysqli and PDO_MySQL.
Connect to Adobe Experience Manager Data
If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can use the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to configure the DSN. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.
The driver connects to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) instances that expose the JCR repository over WebDAV. It supports both on-premises AEM and AEM as a Cloud Service deployments.
To establish a connection, set the following properties:
- URL: The WebDAV-enabled JCR server URL.
- AEM as a Cloud Service: https://author-pXXXXX-eXXXXX.adobeaemcloud.com/crx/server
- Local development: http://localhost:4502/crx/server
- User: Your AEM username.
- Password: Your AEM password.
Note: Tables are dynamically generated based on the JCR repository structure. Ensure that the configured user has sufficient permissions to access the required content paths in the AEM repository.
Configure the SQL Gateway
See the SQL Gateway Overview to set up connectivity to Adobe Experience Manager data as a virtual MySQL database. You will configure a MySQL remoting service that listens for MySQL requests from clients. The service can be configured in the SQL Gateway UI.

Connect in PHP
The following examples show how to use object-oriented interfaces to connect and execute queries. Initialize the connection object with the following parameters to connect to the virtual MySQL database:
- Host: Specify the remote host location where the service is running. In this case "localhost" is used for the remote host setting since the service is running on the local machine.
- Username: Specify the username for a user you authorized on the SQL Gateway's Users tab.
- Password: Specify the password for the authorized user account.
- Database Name: Specify the system DSN as the database name.
- Port: Specify the port the service is running on; port 3306 in this example.
mysqli
<?php
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "user", "password", "CData AdobeExperienceManager Sys","3306");
?>
PDO
<?php
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=CData AdobeExperienceManager Sys;port=3306', 'user', 'password');
?>
Query in PHP
With the connection established, you can then access tables. The following steps walk through the example:
- Query the table; for example, Content. The results will be stored as an associative array in the $result object.
- Iterate over each row and column, printing the values to display in the PHP page.
- Close the connection.
mysqli
$result = $mysqli->query("SELECT Id, Name FROM Content WHERE Name = 'example'");
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
foreach ($row as $k=>$v) {
echo "$k : $v";
echo "<br>";
}
}
$mysqli->close();
PDO
$result = $pdo->query("SELECT Id, Name FROM Content WHERE Name = 'example'");
while($row = $result->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
foreach ($row as $k=>$v) {
echo "$k : $v";
echo "<br>";
}
}
$result = null;
$pdo = null;