[Qgis-developer] Re: [Qgis-user] mdb files?

[Mateusz Loskot]

William Kyngesburye wrote:
> It is possible on OSX, but you must spend a few $.  GDAL can read
> personal geodatabases, stored in MDBs, using an ODBC driver.  But, you
> must make sure that it is built with iODBC, not UnixODBC, and this takes
> a bit of patching (my GDAL framework is built this way).  Then you need
> to install Actual Technologies's MS Access ODBC driver (this is
> commercial software, but cheap).

William,

I can not agree.
I've been working on PGeo driver for OGR for and it works with unixODBC.
The problem is with mdbtools which behave very instable from
version to version.

For example release newer mdbtools-0.6pre1 doesn't work but older onw
mdbtools-0.5.99.0.6pre1.0.20050409 does.

I've been investigating these issues and found solution, but MDB Tools
project seems to be orphaned because I've not got any response to my
e-mails with my offers with fixes since 5 months.

You can find details in following thread:

http://lists.maptools.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2006-May/008898.html

and here

http://lists.maptools.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2006-May/008953.html

Non-ESRI PGeo mdb files can be accessed through OGR ODBC driver.
Here you can also see that it's possible to use OGR ODBC driver on
Windows to connect to MDB file. I don't have any Microsoft Office
installed.

http://bugzilla.remotesensing.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471

This things are supposed to work, so in case you have any problems,
please post them on the gdal-dev list or submit appropriate bug report
http://bugzilla.remotesensing.org/

That will help us to keep GDAL reliability.

Cheers
-- 
Mateusz Loskot
http://mateusz.loskot.net