Connecting to a Dreamhost MySQL database

I have set up a database on Dreamhost with a host name and a couple of users

What I need to know is how do I connect to the database externally.

I am developing a small application that needs to access this database from a desktop PC. There will be several users and they are spread out all over the place so a centralised DB is the answer.

I will be using the MySQL SDK for DB access to be run on a Windows/Intell box.

I don't want to use PHP and HTML to do this because that would mean I have to learn PHP and I already know C++ and I don't want to spend more than a week or two doing this.

Thank you in advance.

You would need to allow the IP address, hostname, or a range of IPs or hostnames to access a particular database user. You can do this from the panel.

Strangely, I can't seem to get my dynamic DNS'd hostname to work. Using the IP address works though. If I ping the dynamic hostname it resolves correctly, but for some reason MySQL doesn't like it.

Maybe you could use the approach of connecting MS Access tables to MySQL with ODBC: http://ykfp.org/ODBC/ Now I distribute Access forms, queries and routines to my users, but have the main data tables pulled into Access at run time from MySQL.