[Zope] MS Access interfacing

[Bruce]

I'm managing a site with lots of different info. It's Linux+Apache, 
with a brand spankin' new Zope install.

I'd like to add more info and features to the site, most of it 
dynamic, and just about all of it somebody else's responsibility to 
maintain.

My best success so far has been with Excel spreadsheets. In this 
case, the page maintainer stores it on an NT server, and I run a cgi 
script that ftp's a copy over, and then it gets displayed via 
xl2html. This has the advantage of making a local copy for a backup, 
in case something untoward should happen, and the it's completely 
transparent to the person responsible for maintaining the page. As 
far as he's concerned, it just magically gets updated on the website.

This works, primarily because the spreadsheets are pretty much under 
50kb.

Now I'm faced with searching a 20Mb Access database and displaying 
selected records from it.

Downloading a new copy with every access at 20Mb is prohibitive, and 
it's not updated so often as to be important. I can manually stash it 
wherever necessary as needed.

The first question is where to stash it. I want to avoid installing 
new software or services on the various machines, though I certainly 
could, within reason and limitiation. Ideally, I want to just stash 
it on the Linux server, and have Zope take care of the interface and 
display. But looking at the Jet ODBC connectors, it appears that they 
really want to live in Windows.

Which is all well and good. The database maintainer is using a 
Windows machine, and I have our local NT server, either will do, but 
I'd rather not install Python on either of them if I didn't have to, 
though I can if needs must.

Which also brings me the question, how does my Linux Zope 
installation talk to the Windows server hosting the database? By way 
of the connector?

I hope this all isn't too basic...

Thanks
Bruce