JCCyC's Geeky Tip of the Day: Stuck with MS Access?

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

mdbtools: http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/

Nice overview at http://otn.oracle.com/pub/articles/gagne_access.html

New Life for Old Microsoft Access Data
By Marcel Gagné

Learn how to easily migrate Access data to the Oracle Database on Linux using open-source tools

One of the sad facts about our relentless journey forward in the world of computers and software is that we sometimes find ourselves abandoning old data. We move from one word processing office package to another, only to discover that our old documents can no longer be opened.

The same is true of databases. A small shop may find that storing information on a PC database is sufficient, but what happens when it's time to move? We may gripe about leaving our valuable information behind, but we often do leave it. However, what may have seemed unimportant enough to abandon at the time can sometimes demand our attention.

I recently had just such a problem. A community organization I worked with had a PC-based application with a rather large membership database in Microsoft Access format. A custom program from a third party had been written to work with the database, but in time the license had expired and there was no longer a way to get an update of the software. As luck would have it, the information had suddenly become important again. We had the old database backed up and stored on a Linux system. In our new open source world, plenty of powerful databases, such as the Oracle Database on Linux, were available to us. One option would have been to purchase a copy of Microsoft Access and create an application, but that would have involved locking ourselves into the same proprietary mold that had gotten us into this mess in the first place. Furthermore, the organization wanted to be able to access this data remotely from a secure server.

(...)

Looking around for solutions to this dilemma led me to Brian Bruns' Web site and his mdbtools package, a collection of command-line tools plus a GUI whose sole purpose is to provide a way to extract information from Access databases. (...)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

1. GNU/Kick

:kick: