[PLUG] mdbtools

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Wed Jul 23 02:54:29 UTC 2008


On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:24:35 -0600 (MDT)
Carlos Konstanski <ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com> dijo:

> > On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Carlos Konstanski wrote:
> >
> >> Looking for some help with using mdbtools.  I know that at least one of
> >> you have used it because I see a post of yours on their souceforge site.
> >> Rather than signing up for yet another mailing list, I thought I'd try to
> >> get an answer here.

> >   I'm probably that person. However, we did not get the contract for that
> > project and a need to translate Access files hasn't come up again. Ergo, I
> > cannot offer any help.
> >
> > Rich
> 
> Yep, you were.
> 
> I've been messing with it more, and it seems that a lot of the tools act
> directly on the .mdb file.  I may not need an ODBC config at all.  I'm
> considering going the route of exporting the data into a text file dump, and
> then importing it into a more usable database.  This seems to be quite doable
> with the basic tools.

Carlos,

I recently needed to read an MS Access database file. Actually, all I
needed was one table. After much messing around I finally discovered
that Kexi can read MS Access database files. Since I wanted to get it
into open source format, I just let Kexi import it into its native
SQLite format. 

Eventually I discovered that Kexi and SQLite are not quite ready for
prime time. Too many features not yet implemented. So I connected
OpenOffice Base the the Kexi file. I thought that would solve the
problem of the missing features, but it turns out that OOo Base simply
reads the external data and uses the features of the external program.
If the external program cannot handle a particular query, then the same
query in OOo will fail as well. And when I say missing features I'm
talking some really basic stuff, like being able to append records to a
table.

In the end I moved it into OOo Base native format where I had no
problems with missing features. Unfortunately, that was not a perfect
solution either, as OOo Base is Java and the screen refresh is slower
than the second coming.



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