Access MDB databases

GDAL/OGR >= 1.9.0

OGR optionally supports reading access .mdb files by using the Java Jackcess library.

This driver is primarily meant as being used on Unix platforms to overcome the issues often met with the MDBTools library that acts as the ODBC driver for MDB databases.

The driver can detect ESRI Personal Geodatabases and Geomedia MDB databases, and will deal them exactly as the PGeo and Geomedia drivers do. For other MDB databases, all the tables will be presented as OGR layers.

How to build the MDB driver (on Linux)

You need a JDK (a JRE is not enough) to build the driver. On Ubuntu 10.04 with the openjdk-6-jdk package installed, 
./configure --with-java=yes --with-mdb=yes
On others Linux flavors, you may need to specify : 
./configure --with-java=/path/to/jdk/root/path --with-jvm-lib=/path/to/libjvm/directory --with-mdb=yes
where /path/to/libjvm/directory is for example /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64/server

It is possible to add the --with-jvm-lib-add-rpath option (no value or "yes") to embed the path to the libjvm.so in the GDAL library.

How to run the MDB driver (on Linux)

You need a JRE and 3 external JARs to run the driver.
  1. If you didn't specify --with-jvm-lib-add-rpath at configure time, set the path of the directory that contains libjvm.so in LD_LIBRARY_PATH or in /etc/ld.so.conf.
  2. Download jackcess-1.2.XX.jar (but 2.X does not with the current driver), commons-lang-2.4.jar and commons-logging-1.1.1.jar (other versions might work)
  3. Put the 3 JARs either in the lib/ext directory of the JRE (e.g. /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/ext) or in another directory and explicitly point to each of them with the CLASSPATH environment variable.

Resources

See also