Microsoft Access Advice

[jcmc]

Hi there,

So I have quite happily run VMWare Fusion 7 on my late 2010 iMac for a number of years, primarily so I could access a largish Microsoft Access database I use regularly for reference. Recently I updated my iMac to High Sierra which broke my VMWare compatibility and, because I essentially use it for nothing else, I thought I might try and export my Access database to a spreadsheet and find a suitable Mac database application.

So I downloaded VMWare Fusion 10 with a view of using the 30-day trial to do this and I'm getting all sorts of error messages which people on the VMW forums suggest a workaround which looks hugely complex (for me) and not necessarily especially secure.

So to the question: I have the database .mdb file but I cannot open it as I can't access my virtual machine. Is there anything I can do with it to convert or export it outside my inaccessible Access application?

Thanks,

C.

 

[organicCPU]

Did not try this, but mdbtools seems to do such conversions.

 

[jcmc]

Didn't review well at all on Mac App Store. Tried mdb lite instead and immediately got a vague error message upon trying to access database. Have sent a report to developers but not at all encouraged.

 

[organicCPU]

In case you don't want to wait for a solution for mdb lite, here is how it should work:

http://brewformulas.org/Mdbtools

brew install mdbtools

https://stackoverflow.com/questions...an-mdb-access-file-to-mysql-or-plain-sql-file

Extracted from the answers at stackoverflow a shell script based on mdbtools that was created by mikkom and is hosted by togume does the actual conversion:
https://gist.github.com/togume/83b4bf40e1528742374bbce338270f34

#!/bin/bash
TABLES=$(mdb-tables -1 $1)

for t in $TABLES
do
  echo "DROP TABLE IF EXISTS $t;"
done

mdb-schema $1 mysql
for t in $TABLES
do
  mdb-export -D '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' -I mysql $1 $t
done

If you paste the above code into a text editor and save it as to_mysql.sh, you could use it like this

./to_mysql.sh database.mdb > data.sql
or
./to_mysql.sh database.mdb | mysql destination-db -u user -p

Hope this helps.