[GRASSLIST:10088] Re: trying to read in ArcView/.mdb file of NYC roads

[William Kyngesburye]

MDB is used by the ArcGIS Personal Geodatabase.  GDAL/OGR 1.3.1 has  
support for reading these (except that it doesn't read annotation).   
It does this by using ODBC.  So you need an ODBC driver for the MDB  
format (MS Access) as well as GDAL.  Those can be a bit difficult to  
get ($$), as they normally work as a bridge so you also need a  
running MS Access server on a Windows PC.  On Windows, there may be  
ODBC drivers that can directly read the MDB file, but I have no idea  
about various flavors of Linux.

I have tried an Access ODBC driver on Mac OS X that can directly read  
the MDB.  As shareware, it only works on the first 3 records of a  
database until payed, but it seems to work.

On Jan 31, 2006, at 6:24 AM, Markus Neteler wrote:

> U. George wrote:
>
>> from the website:
>> http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/dwnlion.shtml
>>
>> i would like to view the roads in the bronx. I am not familiar with
>> either grass, or arcview.
>> I have built 'grass' from source.  But am unable to import the
>> LION.mdb data file.
>>
>>
>> GRASS 6.0.1 (GRASS):/tmp/lion > unzip -l nyc_lion05bav.zip
>> Archive:  nyc_lion05bav.zip
>>   Length     Date   Time    Name
>>  --------    ----   ----    ----
>>     15360  05-10-05 14:59   LION Streets.lyr
>>     18432  05-10-05 14:52   LION.lyr
>>     27640  05-02-05 13:53   NYC LION Geocoding (GDB).lot
>>     27201  05-10-05 11:44   NYC LION Geocoding (SDE).lot
>>    133436  08-02-05 10:11   nyc_lion_metadata.htm
>>  48627712  08-02-05 10:08   Data/LION.mdb
>>         0  07-11-05 12:21   Data/
>>    109568  07-20-05 12:34   Geocoding with LION.doc
>>  --------                   -------
>>  48959349                   8 files
>>
> You may use:
>
>  http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/
>  " The MDB Tools project is a effort to document the MDB file format
> used in Microsoft <http://www.microsoft.com/>'s Access database
> <http://www.microsoft.com/office/access/default.asp> package, and to
> provide a set of tools and applications to make that data available on
> other platforms."
>
> Markus
>

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos at kyngchaos.com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

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