Re: Import MDB
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg95370] Re: Import MDB
- From: Albert Retey <awnl at gmx-topmail.de>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:26:31 -0500 (EST)
- References: <gkpput$drm$1@smc.vnet.net>
Hi, > > according to Wolfram Mathematica should be able to read an Access database. The > > first example from the manual: > > Import[ "ExampleData/buildings.mdb", "Elements" ] > > works as expected. However, the next example (and all others) from the > > manual: > > Import[ "ExampleData/buildings.mdb", "Datasets" ] > > reports an error: "Import::fmterr: Cannot import data as MDB format." > > As this is not a very exaustive message, I do not know whats wrong. no idea whats going wrong, but for mdb files you have the alternative to access the data via DatabaseLink which probably has even some advantages, although it is admittedly a little more work to set this up... > In the manual I found: "System requirement: Import of MDB files is > > supported on computers that are capable of running Java 1.5." I am > > running version 1.6, could it be that a newer version is not accepted by > > Mathematica? I don't even think that mathematica uses the systems JVM, it installs its own and only if it is (mis-)configured to do so it would use another, so I think this probably wants to say a Java 1.5 JVM running on your computer (platform) is available so Mathematica can be shipped with it. Probably that comes from a time when there was no Java 1.5 available for one or some of the supported platforms... To me it looks like version 7 comes with Java 1.6 anyway so I think that is not your problem. On my computer mathematica 6 uses Java 1.5 and the example still doesn't work. It is probably just that the library that is used for this imports can't for some reason handle that file, I have no idea how common that is with access databases, there might very well be different versions of the data forma. The following seems to work alright (once you have set up the odbc driver for buildings.mdb as described in the DatabaseLink): Needs["DatabaseLink`"] conn = OpenSQLConnection[JDBC["odbc", "buildings"]] SQLTables[conn] SQLSelect[conn, "Buildings"] hth, albert