Bug 6572 claims that MEMO fields cannot be read.

Oddly, this also happens in ASP/vbscript, however you can MEMO fields to work correctly with the following:

You can get MEMO fields to work.  Right now it takes some finesse.

#1) You may try adding $SQL_CUR_USE_ODBC

#2) You need to use odbc_longreadlen before you use odbc_fetch_row, otherwise it will not read enough characters.

#3) As of 4.0.2, making odbc_longread too long may cause PHP to become unstable.

#4) You may need to make a query that only returns the MEMO field to read it correctly.  Otherwise it sometimes just doesn't work (this is similar in ASP and so is probably a bug with Access or ODBC drivers for it.)

Example:

$conn = odbc_connect( $DSN, $user, $pw, $SQL_CUR_USE_ODBC );
$result = odbc_exec( $conn, $query );
odbc_longreadlen( $result, 1000000);

/* Your odbc_fetch_row, etc, will now work */