6.3 KiB
MDB Tools, where open source goes to die.
This is a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of the original MDB Tools by Brian Buns. I got sick of seeing the project waste away, so I'm taking the initiative to get MDB Tools whipped back into shape and properly maintained.
A brief history: the last official release (version 0.7.1) occurred in 2016. cyberemissary (whose work this fork is based on) made a release in December 2018 and called it 0.8.2. I am not planning a formal release but rather collecting and merging patches to submit upstream. In the meantime you are welcome to use this code base:
https://github.com/evanmiller/mdbtools
Intended focus areas:
- Security / fuzz testing
- Continuous integration with Travis and AppVeyor
- Removing dependencies
A re-formatted and updated README file follows.
In a chipper open-source voice...
Welcome to the exciting world of MDB Tools! In short, MDB Tools is a set of programs to help you use Microsoft Access file in various settings.
The initial goal of these tools is to be able to extract data structures and data from mdb files. This goal will of course expand over time as the file format becomes more well understood.
Components
The major pieces of MDB Tools are:
libmdb
The core library that allows access to MDB files programatically.
libmdbsql
Builds on libmdb to provide a SQL engine (aka Jet)
utils
Provids command line utilities, including:
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| mdb-ver | Prints the version (JET 3 or 4) of an mdb file. |
| mdb-schema | Prints DDL for the specified table. |
| mdb-export | Export table to CSV format. |
| mdb-tables | A simple dump of table names to be used with shell scripts. |
| mdb-count | A simple count of number of rows in a table, to be used in shell scripts and ETL pipelines. |
| mdb-header | Generates a C header to be used in exporting mdb data to a C prog. |
| mdb-parsecsv | Generates a C program given a CSV file made with mdb-export. |
| mdb-sql | A simple SQL engine (also used by ODBC and gmdb). |
| prcat | Prints the catalog table from an mdb file. |
| prkkd | Dump of information about design view data given the offset to it. |
| prtable | Dump of a table definition. |
| prdata | Dump of the data given a table name. |
| prole | Dump of ole columns given a table name and sargs. |
| odbc | An ODBC driver for use with unixODBC or iODBC driver manager. Allows one to use MDB files with PHP for example. |
| gmdb2 | The Gnome MDB File Viewer and debugger. Still alpha. |
| mdb-hexdump | (in src/extras) Simple hex dump utility that I've been using to look at mdb files. |
License
Files in libmdb, libmdbsql, and libmdbodbc are licensed under LGPL and the utilities and gui program are under the GPL, see COPYING.LIB and COPYING files respectively.
Requirements
First, you must have reasonably current installations of:
If you want to build the SQL engine, you'll need bison or byacc, and flex.
If you want to build the ODBC driver, you'll need unixodbc-dev (version
2.2.10 or above) or iodbc.
If you want to build man pages, you'll need txt2man.
If you want to generate the html version of the docbook, you'll need openjade and basic dsl catalogs.
Installation
Last version is available at https://github.com/evanmiller/mdbtools
$ autoreconf -i -f -Wno-portability
If you want to build the html version of the docbook documentation, you need to
set the environment variable DOCBOOK_DSL to the modular dsl translation file.
For exemple, before configure, you need something like:
$ export DOCBOOK_DSL=/usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/modular/html/docbook.dsl
$ ./configure
OR for a complete install (requires bison, flex, and unixODBC):
$ ./configure --with-unixodbc=/usr/local
By default, MDB Tools is linked against the copy of
GLib returned by pkg-config. You can
point to a different GLib installation using the GLIB_CFLAGS and GLIB_LIBS
enivornment variables. Or, you can disable GLib entirely with the
--disable-glib flag, in which case MDB Tools will use an internal
implementation of GLib's functions.
configure can be passed any of the following flags to turn on other
capabilities. Note that the options --with-unixodbc and --with-iodbc are
mutually exclusive.
--with-unixodbc specifies the location of the unixODBC driver manager and
causes the unixODBC driver to be built.
--with-iodbc specifies the location of the iODBC driver manager and
causes the iODBC driver to be built.
A list of general options is available in the INSTALL file, and
configure --help will give you the list of mdbtools specific options.
$ make
Once MDB Tools has been compiled, libmdb.[so|a] will be in the src/libmdb directory and the utility programs will be in the src/util directory.
You can then install (to /usr/local by default) by running the following as root:
$ make install
Some systems will also need the ld cache to be updated after installation; You can do that running:
$ ldconfig
Hacking
If you are interested in helping, read the HACKING file for a description of where the code stands and what has been gleened of the file format.
Contact
Please send bug reports to the new github repository. https://github.com/evanmiller/mdbtools/issues