[lug] Converting MS-Access to text/MySQL

[John Mueller]

Thanks Jeff for the info.  Interesting to hear about your experiences with
this situation of moving data from one database to another.  Also
interesting to see that you ended up going with a custom solution, which is
what I am seeing be the norm in such situations.  Having to pay for a custom
solution when you will be only using it once (at least you hope it is only
once :-) makes it hard to fork over the cash for a custom option.  That is
one reason why we ended up developing the XML-based DB Exchanger as we had
several clients that were in situations like yours and there was not an easy
and cost-effective application to transfer loads of data.

If only DB companies would create better ways to move data from one platform
to another --- but, I guess that would not be a wise business decision on
their part.  But gives opportunity for other companies to come up with other
solutions (at least consumers want this...., I hope :-) ).

> Best of luck with your application!

Thanks.

- J. Mueller

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us]On
> Behalf Of Jeff Schroeder
> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:43 PM
> To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
> Subject: Re: [lug] Converting MS-Access to text/MySQL
>
>
> 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
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