= Mdbtools =

See also: Starting with GDAL/OGR 1.9.0, the [http://gdal.org/ogr/drv_mdb.html MDB] driver is an alternate way of reading ESRI Personal GeoDatabase .mdb files without requiring unixODBC and MDB Tools.

On Linux, the ''mdbtools'' package is required to use the OGR [wiki:PGeo] (ESRI Personal GeoDatabase) driver. See the [http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_pgeo.html documentation] of the driver how to setup mdbtools and unixODBC.

However the ''mdbtools'' package is currently unmaintened upstream and suffer from a few bugs that prevent the latest released version to be used successfully for the OGR PGeo driver. See also [wiki:PGeo].

You can apply the below mdbtools-0.5.99.0.6pre1.0.20051109-odbc.patch patch on top of the [http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mdbtools/mdbtools_0.5.99.0.6pre1.0.20051109.orig.tar.gz Debian mdbtools_0.5.99.0.6pre1.0.20051109.orig.tar.gz] to improve the situation a bit. Note that this patch is only of band-aid quality and that the implementation of SQLGetData() would require a non trivial amount of work to make it work reliably. Currently, this will truncate retrieve data to 512 characters, a limit which can be easily hit by geometies of type linestring or polygons.