The message further below went accidentally not to the list... > Tim Harsch wrote: > > Forgive my naivity (or just flawed understanding) but how would one go > about creating a DBD::Access? For instance DBD::Oracle is built on > OCI, does Access have a similar network protocol? I thought that ODBC > was about the only MS supported method of communicating to it...
One of the earlier mails said: > > From: Tim Bunce > > On Tue, Jun 25, 2002 at 10:27:20AM -0700, Jeff Zucker wrote: > > > Orlando Andico wrote: > > > > > > > It IS possible to read MSAccess files on a Linux box. > > > > http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/ This SourceForge project provides access to .mdb files which reside on a Linux filesystem. No Windows, Access or else involved. *That* would make it possible to do a DBD::Access. Tim Harsch replied to that: ========================Begin quote=========================== And a previous email said: JEFFZ> At first glance it looks like it would be trivial to build an > AnyData::Format::Access.pm using mdbtools which would then provide > direct DBI interface to the MDB files. If anyone is interested in > doing this, let me know and I'll help. TIMB> I'd rather someone did a DBD::Access. Also MDB Tools would be backdoor access to the datafiles which is not access to the database. Which means you would be skipping multiuser logins, deadlock control, atomic transactions etc. =============End Quote Tim Harsch=========================== I see. Thanks for that insight, Tim H.! However, even if you use Access itself to handle .mdb files, that isn't really multiuser-ready! At work we had serious trouble using .mdb files from different locations. There is no database server which could take care of concurrent writes etc.! The whole file is transferred to the client computers, modified there and then written back (in portions) to the file server. Concurrent modifications on the "database" regularly destroy the file beyond repair. So I think the mdbtools are just doing the same as Access itself, but I'll have to dig further into this (not this week, though). So the sane approach here would be to use mbdtools as the actual file reader/writer, but secured by some kind of database "server" or proxy. DBI::Proxy pops into my mind here, maybe it could be used to serialize reads and writes? Not being able to use .mdb files as real databases with multi-user support bugs me for quite a while now - at work I have to use them (management decision, nothing else allowed)... Jeff, Tim Bunce, Tim Harsch: I would like to see DBD::Access (or whatever it should be called) happen, but my skills are not sufficient. Could we work together? It might be a good idea to invite the mdbtools developers, too, they might be able to help... Best regards, Martin Stricker -- Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/ Webmaster-Forum: http://www.masterportal24.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.cgi Red Hat Linux 7.2 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/ Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/
