[gdal-dev] OGR: Accessing ESRI Personal Geodatabase on OS X

[William Kyngesburye]

PGeo support depends on a working ODBC driver for MDB databases.  On Linux, this is done with mdbtools.  I have not been able to get this working on OS X with the system iODBC (I last looked at it a year ago).  It compiles (with some hackery), but does not load.  I haven't tried mdbtools with UnixODBC, mainly because I prefer to use stuff available from the system, and UnixODBC is a large project.  Maybe if I can whittle it down to a bare minimum needed for mdbtools (and assuming it works), I could bundle it in the GDAL framework.

There is a commercial Actual Access iODBC driver (apparently it's derived from mdbtools), but it corrupts binary data when reading.  I've reported this to the developers, and pestered them, but so far they haven't been able to fix it.

One alternative option that I haven't followed up on yet (mainly lack of C++ skills, also lack of need) is to convert the mdb to sqlite with the mdb-sqlite java tool (http://code.google.com/p/mdb-sqlite/), then write a custom pgeo driver that reads the pgeo data from sqlite instead of ODBC/MDB.  This wouldn't mirror the pgeo driver exactly as a feature (requires a separate external step), but it's _something_.

On Jun 25, 2010, at 2:58 PM, Bob Cave wrote:

> 
> Hello,
> 
> I see that OGR supports reading ESRI Personal Geodatabases.  We are
> considering adding this capability to our product, which has both Windows
> and Mac OS X implementations.  I have tried the basic functionality on
> Windows (using FW_Tools), and the OGR documentation has instructions for
> using the reader on Linux, but I don't see any information about OS X.  Has
> anyone used it on OS X?  If so, what were the major issues that needed to be
> resolved?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Bob
> -- 
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-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.