Yet another attempt to resuscitate MDB Tools – the Access-accessing C library and command-line suite.

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 of this fork:

• Security / fuzz testing
• Removing GLib dependency
• Continuous integration with Travis and AppVeyor

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

Provides 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.
mdb-hexdump	(in src/extras) Simple hex dump utility that I've been using to look at mdb files.

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.

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:

• libtool
• automake
• autoconf (version >= 2.58)

If you want to build the SQL engine, you'll need bison (version >= 3.0) 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