Ok guys I was approached by a client to create a web service that will allow users to sort through a bunch of proprietary data. This is all fine and dandy but the catch is, all of this data comes from software they have installed on local servers at their location. I'm thinking of writing a cron job to receive and parse the data at a set interval. The data can be accessed by way of an ODBC protocol but what I need to figure out is how the hell I'm going to get the data from the local server to a remote server.
My initial thinking is, is it possible to straight connect to the local server, from PHP using the odbc_connect feature but I guess some how I'd need to have an address for the local server that is public facing?
If this isn't an option would the next best thing be something that can parse the data and server it up, online, to be accessed via the remote server? I'm not much of an "I.T." guy so I'm not sure how I'd even go about making this local server accesible from the internet. Does any of this seem possible or do you guys know of any better options? Thanks!