Create ESRI personal geodatabase (.mdb) in R?

Hi Roger,

A bit off-topic, but what do you think will be the real replacement for
the shapefile as the de facto standard vector file format? SpatialLite?
Perhaps unfortunately, shapefiles will be around for a long time. The only 
alternatives in volume are probably KML, but are restricted in many ways. 
We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

Roger
Dan

On Fri, 2009-10-23 at 21:47 +0200, Roger Bivand wrote:
On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Mark Na wrote:

Hi Dan & Roger,
Thanks for your comments. What do you know about ESRI's new "file
geodatabase" file structure -- is it any more open (or integrable with R)
than the personal geodatabase?
The last slide on:

http://gis.esri.com/library/userconf/pug07/papers/workshops/file-gdb.pdf

says that it is using an open API with GDAL, ODBC, but no details. I guess
someone with access to ArcGIS would need to create various things in the
file folder and see what they are. I'm afraid that they are not intended
for inter-operation.

Roger

Mark

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no> wrote:

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Mark Na wrote:

 Hello,
I would like to write spatial data to an ESRI personal geodatabase (.mdb)
and I wonder if anyone has experience with this.

My workflow, at present, is as follows:

1. Read spatial data into R (from a .csv file).

2. Manipulate the data in various ways.

3. Export the data from R as a .csv file, import that into ArcGIS, add XY,
save the data as a table in an existing personal geodatabase (.mdb).

I would like to automate step 3 by creating the .mdb in R and saving
various
dataframes as tables within the .mdb, so nothing has to be done in ArcGIS.

I would appreciate any help you might be able to provide with this.

This format is not available to others than ArcGIS license holders, who
also run on Windows and have an Access license (it is an undocumented,
custom Access database file). If you want to rebuild rgdal from source
yourself with the Pgeo driver, or ensure that an Access DLL is visible to
the driver, feel free to do so - hints are included in the README.windows
file installed with rgdal. Since the Pgeo driver is read only, this only
gets you so far. The format is closed (and very muddled, as browsing such a
file will show), and best avoided in its entirety. Simply saving a few
hundred point coordinates may run you up to hundreds of Kb.

Roger

Many thanks, Mark

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--
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no

Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no

Create ESRI personal geodatabase (.mdb) in R?

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