Re: mdb files?

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).

I tested it a while back with the demo driver (only reads 5 records)  
and it really does work.  I don't remember how well, except that I  
think the data had to be simple - no routes or other such complex  
feature types, and there may have been issues with field types.  It  
may have improved since then.

Just about every other Access ODBC solution out there operates as a  
bridge to a running Access server, so it wouldn't be simple.  But  
Actual's driver are just for OSX, I'm not sure if there are similar  
non-bridge ODBC drivers for Linux.

On Oct 29, 2006, at 7:51 PM, Tim Sutton wrote:

> Is it an ESRI spatial database? I believe some work has been done  
> to support .mdb in gdal, so it would be worth googling on that and  
> or asking on the gdal mailing list.
>
> Regards
>
> Tim
>
> On 29/10/2006, at 23:33, Will Muir wrote:
>
> > Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with mdb files, on  
> > either the Mac or Linux?  Preferably I would like to convert them  
> > to a Postgis database.  I see there is a package called mdbtools,  
> > though it does not seem to want to compile on the Mac and I have  
> > not tried on Linux yet.  But even if it does work will results be  
> > in a format that could be inserted into Postgis?

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos-p9c68Tqx7MiakBO8gow8eQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

"Oh, look, I seem to have fallen down a deep, dark hole.  Now what  
does that remind me of?  Ah, yes - life."

- Marvin