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

[Even Rouault]

> I also had problems compiling the old version (at sourceforge), but I think
> it was something in the CLI tools, which I didn't need for ODBC.  I made a
> custom makefile to get the ODBC driver, but it never worked.  Maybe I'll
> try again with the new version (though it's low priority for me, no need).
> 
> There is a commercial OS X ODBC driver (Actual Tech) that I thought was
> based on mdbtools, but that can't be right since they don't distribute
> their source code.  I could not get theirs to works, problem skipping
> bytes in blobs (which is where the coordinate data is stored), they could
> not fix it.

I've just tried with the GIT version of  https://github.com/brianb/mdbtools 
and with UnixODBC 2.3.1.

Like last time I tried, I got compilation errors to compile odbc.c (the 
implementation of the ODBC driver) from mdbtools due to 64bit 
incompatibilities. I fixed them to the point where it compiles, but the MDB 
ODBC driver still misbehaves.

However, I tried the mdb-export tool that just uses the libmdb API and it 
seemed to read correctly a Personal Geodatabase MDB (whereas the old version 
that ships with my Ubuntu 10.04 crashes), so it should perhaps be possible for 
someone to write a driver that used the libmdb API directly, or alter the OGR 
MDB driver to use libmdb instead of Jackess (the Java part of the driver is 
quite isolated, so libmdb and Jackess could be 2 backends used indifferently by 
the driver).


> 
> -----
> William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
> http://www.kyngchaos.com/
> 
> The equator is so long, it could encircle the earth completely once.