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

Access Airtable data like you would a database - read, write, and update Airtable Tables, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Natively Connect to Airtable Data in PHP


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

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Airtable into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Airtable-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Airtable 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.

APIKey, BaseId and TableNames parameters are required to connect to Airtable. ViewNames is an optional parameter where views of the tables may be specified.

  • APIKey : API Key of your account. To obtain this value, after logging in go to Account. In API section click Generate API key.
  • BaseId : Id of your base. To obtain this value, it is in the same section as the APIKey. Click on Airtable API, or navigate to https://airtable.com/api and select a base. In the introduction section you can find "The ID of this base is appxxN2ftedc0nEG7."
  • TableNames : A comma separated list of table names for the selected base. These are the same names of tables as found in the UI.
  • ViewNames : A comma separated list of views in the format of (table.view) names. These are the same names of the views as found in the UI.

Establish a Connection

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Airtable 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.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC Airtable Source","user","password"); ... odbc_close($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 SampleTable_1 WHERE Column2 = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Airtable Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM SampleTable_1 WHERE Column2 = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('SomeValue'));

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Airtable Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, Column1 FROM SampleTable_1 WHERE Column2 = 'SomeValue'");

Process Results

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Airtable data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, Column1 FROM SampleTable_1 WHERE Column2 = 'SomeValue'"); while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){ echo $row["Id"] . "\n"; }

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Airtable data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM SampleTable_1 WHERE Column2 = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('SomeValue')); 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 Airtable-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.