Oh, the power of ODBC!!!

[theCoder]

It's great that your doing database work, but mysql does let you manipulate to the data directly:

[scott@len ~/dev/EQEmu-0.2.0/bin]$ mysql -ueqe -p eq020
Enter password:
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 205 to server version: 3.23.41

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> show tables;
+-------------------+
| Tables_in_eq020   |
+-------------------+
| account           |
| authentication    |
| character_        |
| faction_list      |
| faction_values    |
| guilds            |
| items             |
| lootdrop          |
| lootdrop_entries  |
| loottable         |
| loottable_entries |
| name_filter       |
| npc_faction       |
| npc_types         |
| quest             |
| spawn2            |
| spawnbak          |
| spawnentry        |
| spawngroup        |
| variables         |
| zone              |
| zone_points       |
| zone_server       |
| zone_state_dump   |
| zoneserver_auth   |
+-------------------+
25 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> select * from account where name='eqemu';
+----+-------+----------+--------+--------------+
| id | name  | password | status | lsaccount_id |
+----+-------+----------+--------+--------------+
|  1 | eqemu | eqemu    |      0 |         NULL |
+----+-------+----------+--------+--------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

And so on. ODBC is just another way to get at the data, and (as you mentioned) lets some other products get to it. If you really want to get into it, you might want to learn some SQL (it's not that hard -- it's mostly English like sentences). http://www.w3schools.com/sql/ is a good place to start and gives you a quick basic understanding of SQL.

Of course, you should use whatever's easiest for you :)