You can't do that. 90% of the time you can't connect to a database remotely (big security risk there). And you don't know the database format (it can change, like it has for phpVMS between releases). XML is the intermediary, you do a POST command to a URL which is in the settings, I take that POST XML data, and translate it into what I need. And it's not one table which it will usually update, I have an internal API, I parse the data into a data structure which I pass to my API, which takes care of extra logic which is needed (triggering events within the system, removing bids, updating pilot and va stats, updating different tables, etc). Especially for submitting PIREPs, it's a complex system.