Miscellaneous Database Tips

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*[http://www.csv-jdbc.com/stels_mdb_jdbc.htm StelsMDB] is a commercial ($110; 30-day free trial) MDB JDBC type 4 driver that allows users to perform SQL queries and other JDBC operations on Microsoft Access database files (MS Access 2000, 2002, 2003, XP versions). Presumably NeoOffice could use the JDBC driver to connect to the Access database. *[http://www.csv-jdbc.com/stels_mdb_jdbc.htm StelsMDB] is a commercial ($110; 30-day free trial) MDB JDBC type 4 driver that allows users to perform SQL queries and other JDBC operations on Microsoft Access database files (MS Access 2000, 2002, 2003, XP versions). Presumably NeoOffice could use the JDBC driver to connect to the Access database.
 +
 +*[http://www.hxtt.com/access.html HXTT Access Pure Java JDBC (1.2, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) Drivers for MS Access] is a commercial ($300+; trial available) Type 4 JDBC driver that supports Access versions from 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2002, to 2003. Presumably NeoOffice could use the JDBC driver to connect to the Access database.
*[http://forjamari.linex.org/projects/mdb2odb/ mdb2odb] is/was a Spanish project to develop an Access-to-OpenDocument Database converter. The project's binaries were available for Debian/Ubuntu, so it is unknown if the code compiles on Mac OS X (or if the project still exists). *[http://forjamari.linex.org/projects/mdb2odb/ mdb2odb] is/was a Spanish project to develop an Access-to-OpenDocument Database converter. The project's binaries were available for Debian/Ubuntu, so it is unknown if the code compiles on Mac OS X (or if the project still exists).

Revision as of 17:04, 27 February 2009

This article is not up to date, or it needs structural or stylistic changes to conform with the rest of this wiki.

The following are miscellaneous database-related tips which currently do not have enough content to warrant a full article and which have no other home.

Contents

dBase import tips

Connecting to dbf files in NeoBase

You can use Base to connect to one or more dbf files.

  1. Go to the File menu and choose New and then Database
  2. In the first pane of the Database Wizard, Choose Connect to an Existing Database
  3. Set the drop-down to dBase
  4. Click Next>>
  5. In the next pane, click on the Browse button
  6. Navigate to the folder in which the dbf files are found
    • You cannot choose a file, you must select a folder.
  7. Click Open
  8. Click Next>>
  9. In the Save and Proceed pane, select the settings as desired
  10. Click on Finish

Importing into Calc

The table structure of the dbf file for all the fields containing leading apostrophes say they are characters. This can easily seen if you import the DBF file and look at the first row. All columns have a header defining it. C is for characters (text), N would be numeric.

So Calc imports the values correctly as Characters. As the number format for the default template is set to numeric, a apostrophe is placed in front of the value to make it a text.

To change such text values to real numeric values, you have several choices:

They are described in this article in NeoWiki.

You can also change the field setting in the DBF from C to N and re-import the file.

Issues with DB2K files

older dbf files in the DB2K format are not compatible with NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org. When the connection is made, most fields will show <OBJECT> for data in Base and #N/A in Calc. If you have a Windows machine available, the solution is to use the dbf-converter program to convert these files to dBase-IV format, which NeoOffice does support.

Microsoft Access-related tips

Well, a lack of drivers will definitely cause files to not be openable. Anything that requires the MS ODBC bridges won't work for sure, including Access files.

N.B. To our knowledge, no one has tried any of the potential solutions below to verify that they work with NeoOffice.

  • An ODBC driver that works with MS Access on a Mac is the Actual ODBC driver. It is a commercial one ($29), but it works with Access. (There was a report that NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha worked with Actual's MySQL ODBC driver, but no one has tried the Access ODBC driver.)
  • The MySQL Migration Toolkit for the Mac can be found in the MySQL GUI Tools Bundle and should be able to be used to move data from an MS Access database to a MySQL one (which NeoOffice will happily deal with). (The Migration Toolkit is known to work with Access files on Windows; however, the migration process appears to require preliminary preparations to be done in Access before the migration can begin.)
  • StelsMDB is a commercial ($110; 30-day free trial) MDB JDBC type 4 driver that allows users to perform SQL queries and other JDBC operations on Microsoft Access database files (MS Access 2000, 2002, 2003, XP versions). Presumably NeoOffice could use the JDBC driver to connect to the Access database.
  • mdb2odb is/was a Spanish project to develop an Access-to-OpenDocument Database converter. The project's binaries were available for Debian/Ubuntu, so it is unknown if the code compiles on Mac OS X (or if the project still exists).

Other options are discussed on the Trinity forum: [1], [2], [3].

Related External Links


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