Anne York <york at zipcon.net> writes:
Wow, thanks for all the good information and ideas on this topic. Have you used mdbtools to convert a data base to something like MySQL or other open source data base?
Yes, that's mostly how I have used mdbtools so far. I modified mdb-export and created a script to use my modified mdb-export and mdb-schema to act like MySQL's mysqldump, i.e. to produce CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements. That way I was able to get tables straight from an Access database into MySQL. Here's a link to what I did: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=2294&atid=302294&func=detail&aid=857342 With those changes and the mdbdump script I am able to do the following to get a table into MySQL: mdbdump accessDB accessTable | mysql mysqlDB As it is now mdb-export produces output in delimited format so you could use mdb-schema to create the table, export the data using mdb-export and then load it into mysql (or whatever). [it looks like the INSERT statements option has been added to mdb-export, but I am not sure about the MySQL backend]
It seems that if I needed to do unions or intersections, I would have to do the conversion and use the other database from R since I'd rather work on my Linux machine.
Another alternative would be to use mdbtools with the R functions I posted earlier to read the tables into R and then use RODBC to save (sqlSave) them into another database. This would probably be the easiest because all you need to do is get the current mdb-tools as it is now (my changes were made to an old version). This is now the my preferred route. BTW, I have now tidied the functions up a little so they don't create temporary files anymore.
On the negative side, Brian Ripley reported problems compiling mdbtools, and on the Debian website, there were some security alerts (overflow problems) about mdbtools. Clearly, you were able to compile mdbtools.
I had to make some symlinks to get it all to play properly (it seemed to expect libraries in /usr/lib when they were in /usr/local/lib), but it seemed to compile okay. The lib problem might have been a problem on my side though.
Do you know anything about the security risks?
Not a sausage. I use on my local machine so I don't think that they apply to my situation. I could easily be wrong though... Dave
David Whiting University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK