[ls -al]

Guys,

I've acquired some legacy databases that are in Access .MDB format. I need to be able to import the data into my Mac.

FM Pro does not import these files directly. Neither will Excel. How do I massage these files to bring them over to my Mac.

Quick help appreciated.

[asxless]

Originally posted by ls -al:
I've acquired some legacy databases that are in Access .MDB format. I need to be able to import the data into my Mac.

FM Pro does not import these files directly. Neither will Excel. How do I massage these files to bring them over to my Mac.

Quick help appreciated.

I've always used VPC + Windows + Access

Once you get the legacy databases open in Access, you can probably export the raw tables directly to MY SQL on the Mac. Or in a worst case, dump the tables as flat files for import and reconstruction in your data base app of choice.

-- asxless in iLand

[ls -al]

I guess that's the answer I didn't want to hear :-( oh well!

How do I export the tables into MySQL? Is there an easy way to do it? Is there a neutral file format so that I can bring it into FM Pro?

[asxless]

Originally posted by ls -al:
I guess that's the answer I didn't want to hear :-( oh well!

How do I export the tables into MySQL? Is there an easy way to do it? Is there a neutral file format so that I can bring it into FM Pro?

I should have emphasized the word 'probably' in my post ...you can probably export the raw tables directly to MY SQL... because I've never exported data from Acesss to MySQL. But I had seen this site http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/ which claims that "MDB Tools includes programs to export schema and data to other databases such as MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and others.

I _have_ exported data from Access into FileMaker a couple of times. I each case, I was only interested in the raw data and the data structure was simple (e.g. a few tables with very simple relationships). So I just exported each table to comma-separated (or tab separated) flat files. Then imported them into pre built FileMaker data bases.

FWIW I find that the choice of flat file format can make a big difference in the ease of data cleanup after importing into FileMaker. For example, comma-separated files are not too handy when the data fields have embedded commas I often use a spreadsheet app (Excel or OOo Calc) to view (and clean up) the flat files prior to final import into FileMaker.

Perhaps someone who has more experience with MySQL and Access can provide a better solution.

-- asxless in iLand