Question - Accessing an external or remote database

[dcpaq2xx]

Group,

Vbulletin.org communicates with Vbulletin.com to verifiy if a member holds a valid Vbulletin license or not and then decides what access to give them. We are wanting to know how they do this so that we can do the same with our site, but 'they' (Jelsoft/VB Staff) avoid the question and say it cannot be done, and they are able to do this now only because both sites reside on the same server, and the thing is that I can put both ours on the same server too, but they still avoid the question by never replying back when I asked again how...

With our site we are looking for a way to have our board communicate with an external database located on another server using a 'soap' API or some other way of communicating and providing data to our board. (We have the option too to place the database on the same server as the board) We would like to create a database that contains all the current valid licenses issued for a program of ours and add new entries as licenses get sold, then the board would read from this and determine who has access to which things.

Does anyone know how we could go about doing this?

Thanks for reading this.

Doug