[Qgis-user] "Normal" mdb support possible for "normal" people?

[Even Rouault]

Le samedi 22 septembre 2012 00:59:43, Bernd Vogelgesang a écrit :
> Hi there,
>  from a talk at the German User Meeting today in Kassel (thanx to Claas for
> the organization), i got the impression that ONE important thing in qgis
> is still missing:
> Direct support for normal access databases!
> 
> Personal geodatabases work like a charm now (many thanx for this!), but i
> was told, that a lot of people who would be the perfect target group for
> qgis, still work on a completely gis-free level, dealing with their data
> in normal access databases or even worse formats.
> 
> To catch those people and show them the light, it seems to me to be
> crucial, that qgis would be able to add/join/edit normal tables from
> normal access database as well without having to do such odbc-magic apprx.
> 99% of the world population have never heard of.
> 
> Here
> http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/direct-mdb-read-in-QGis-td4637313.html
> i found a "solution" for geeks, but how about those people like me or john
> doe, who have no idea about how to compile gdal with other stuff but are
> merely able to do some gis work?
> 
> I couldn'd find a feature request on the hub on this matter, so i wonder
> if this would be a good feature request, or whether there are technical,
> legal or "political" constraints preventing such a support so far.
> 
> As far as i understand ESRI personal geodatabases are just some pimped
> access databases, so the impossibility to just load such in qgis is a
> mystery to me.
> 
> Can anybody shed some light on this issue?

I've just added some magic to the OGR ODBC driver in GDAL trunk (GDAL 2.0dev) 
so that it can open directly non-spatial MDB databases on Windows.

Note: this is just a shortcut for the "normal" syntax that should work 
currently :

ogrinfo ODBC:DRIVER=Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb);DBQ=filename.mdb

Now : ogrinfo filename.mdb

Best regards,

Even