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MDB (MS Access file) Driver

Table of Contents    1. Introduction    2. Download    3. Status    4. Comparison with OpenOffice.org support    5. Sample Databases

See also:

• Driver development

1. Introduction

The Kexi MDB driver is based upon mdbtools.

Note: So far, the Migration Driver is developed, what means MDB driver can only import your MDB database into a Kexi database. It cannot be used to edit an MDB database. As soon as mdbtools can provide full write support for MDB databases, we'd like to extend this to a full KexiDB driver (however, it's possible that a read-only KexiDB Driver could also be developed before then).

2. Download

The import driver is built-in into Kexi.

3. Status

Currently are supported .mdb and .mde database files created with MS Jet Engine version 3.0 (MS Access 95 and 97) and MS Jet Engine 4.0 (MS Access 2000, XP, 2003). Acess 2007's .accdb files are currently unsupported. This format is not reverse engineered not it has anything in common with MS Office Open XML format. Our advice is to avoid this format if possible and stay with older .mdb file format if you have to use Access.

(These are the formats supported by mdbtools).

Files created with MS Jet 2.0 (MS Access 2) are not and probably will not be supported. You can use free Microsoft conversion tools (Windows-only) to convert these files to newer format and then open them with MDB Driver.

4. Comparison with OpenOffice.org support

• mdb-sdbc-driver

oo.org uses .mdb files in read-write mode on Win32 using a native libraries. On Linux, it uses the MDBTools library too. We're monitoring this effort from time to time. You can also take a look at the patches published on the page. Currently they are just for SQL parser, and we won't be using them in Kexi since KexiDB has its own, more advanced SQL parser.

5. Sample Databases

• Northwind Traders Sample Database
  • Dump of information for the Northwind sample db file
• Database of Sample Forms
• Summing in reports
• MS Access templates from Microsoft - usable for test purposes. Get all of them here (5MB).