SPSS and PHP/MySQL Integration

I apologize up front for the broadness of this question, but I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions/pointers.

A friend's company uses SPSS for statistical data, surveys, etc. They'd like to be able to slice and dice the info via a web interface. I have no knowledge of SPSS, so there may be a simple web front end, but being a PHP/MySQL guy, I wondered if SPSS data can be exported in a way that MySQL can import or PHP can parse. Then I could build an AJAX front end to return queries in real time.

The idea would be a results table that changes when you make selections like "Gender: Male", "Age: 20-25"... each change would update the results in the browser.

So...

1) Can SPSS accomplish this with some kind of front end?

2) Can the data be easily exported in a generic format?

I just want to know if I'm on a fools errand before I talk to my friend's boss about ideas.

TIA. Don

UPDATE: I had a meeting at my friend's company to discuss more specifics. It开发者_StackOverflow sounds like the SPSS data is stored in MS SQL Server, so I'm thinking that I could connect directly to the data if I can see some kind of schema logic and write my own web front end against it.

Alternatively, I may be able to do a scheduled data dump of the data into another format.

http://www.spss.com/smartscore/

In addition, it appears that SPSS has an available API to make the SPSS information available to other apps. Assuming you could get a connection to the SPSS system, it'd be a matter of CURLing the information back and forth (a web service) Aside from the XML brain damage, this is one of the best ways to get two non-similar systems talking to each other.

SPSS has ODBC capabilities, as does MS SQL. Using ODBC you should be able to import all the appropriate tables to your MySQL db and hack away. A generic file dump (SPSS can export to a variety of file formats) would also work, but just includes a few extra steps.

In SPSS the gui for data export will be different depending on the version. Here is an example setup: http://www.indiana.edu/~statmath/stat/all/odbc/4.html#4b