CentOS - Dec 2011 - Using an MS Access database from CentOS release 5.7 (Final)

@Work requires me to manipulate the MS Access database (mdb) file
located on an XP box that is an integral part of a third party
application that is central to the business.

Does anyone have experience doing so?

I have used odbtp in the recent past but it is extremely difficult to
set up on the linux box as I learned when I recently upgraded from
CentOS 4.x to 5.x.

Is there another way to get read and write access to the mdb file from
apache/php running from the linux box?  A couple of hours of googling
last night has resulted in finding very expensive odbc drivers for the
linux box and nothing really foss except the odbc driver managers.


Regards,

Ron Young
919-621-9015
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ronhyoung

+++++++++++++++++++
Little tiny dreams require little tiny thoughts and little tiny steps.
Great big dreams require great big thoughts and little tiny steps.
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Kosh: The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:21 PM, Ron Young <ronyoung at nc.rr.com>
wrote:
> @Work requires me to manipulate the MS Access database (mdb) file
> located on an XP box that is an integral part of a third party
> application that is central to the business.
>
> Does anyone have experience doing so?
>
> I have used odbtp in the recent past but it is extremely difficult to
> set up on the linux box as I learned when I recently upgraded from
> CentOS 4.x to 5.x.
>
> Is there another way to get read and write access to the mdb file from
> apache/php running from the linux box? ?A couple of hours of googling
> last night has resulted in finding very expensive odbc drivers for the
> linux box and nothing really foss except the odbc driver managers.
>
The best approach to doing this is to convert the access tables to use
a sql server instead of the native mdb.   This may or may not be
practical/easy, but access can work over ODBC with the db on
linux/postgresql (among others) where you would have a matching php
client.    Next best would be to write something to give web server
access to the data you need on the windows box, and access it remote
via http.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com

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Ron Young said the following on 14/12/11 22:21:
> @Work requires me to manipulate the MS Access database (mdb) file located
> on an XP box that is an integral part of a third party application that is
> central to the business.
> 
> Does anyone have experience doing so?
I had to import some customer's data from an Access application for a new
(PHP) version of that application I wrote.

I used mdbtools http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/

I scripted the conversion this way:

mdb-export -I -S -X -DF accessfile.mdb "accesstablename"  | sed
's/accesstablename/sqltablename/g' | sed 's/$/;/g' > /tmp/aaa
cat header.sql /tmp/aaa > import.sql
mysql --user=user --password=password < import.sql



header.sql file contains just this line:

use database;





Ciao,
luigi

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