[lug] Converting MS-Access to text/MySQL

[Jeff Schroeder]

John wrote:

> Jeff, were you able to convert your Access data to MySQL?  If so, can
> you tell me what application you used to make it happen?  I have been
> involved with building an XML DB Exchange application and am
> currently doing some market research on what competing applications
> are out there before we launch the beta of it.

After scouring the net the best I could find was an open-source package 
called MDBTools.  You can find it at http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net.  
It seems fairly robust and allows you to access the data inside a raw 
(binary) MDB file without requiring Access to be running.  You can 
export it as delimited text and so on, which was exactly the problem I 
was trying to solve.

Unfortunately, there were some conversion problems with the data.  Some 
columns got shifted (so the header or column name didn't match the data 
in that column) and others simply disappeared.  It's entirely possible 
the data files I was trying to convert-- which were generated by a 
company I had no direct contact with-- were goofy in some way.  But 
since I couldn't reliably convert the data, I couldn't use MDBTools.

That being said, another programmer I work with developed a Visual Basic 
program that is able to convert MDB to text.  However, the program will 
only run on a Windows box (obviously) and I was looking for a 
Linux-based solution (which MDBTools is).  His code isn't 
commercial-grade by any means; it's more of a hack for this project.

Best of luck with your application!

Jeff