MDB Tools to export (migrate) from mdb (Microsoft Access format) to MySQL

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Today I was working on how to convert an old Microsoft Access database into a MySQL database. This convertion could be obtained by first converting the tables in the mdb-file into CSV-files (Comma Separated Values) using MDB Tools and then by importing the csv-files into MySQL using phpMyAdmin.

To export a given table from a mdb-file, we type:

mdb-export db.mdb customers >> customers.csv

In my case, since I got some danish characters, I need to force mdbtools to encode everything as ISO8859-1 instead of UTF-8, which is the default. This can be done by setting the environment variable MDB_ICONV to ISO8859-1

export MDB_ICONV="ISO8859-1"

The resulting CSV-files coult be imported into MySQL using phpMyAdmin.

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Another howto on database migration ms2pg – Migrate Microsoft SQL Server Database to PostgreSQL Database.

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6 Comments »

  1. Ashok said,

    March 13, 2007 @ 3:57

    hi,

    i want to write a rails application to do this work, is it possible?
    please get me some ideas

    Ashok

  2. x2l2 said,

    January 31, 2008 @ 6:01

    i use kexi for this and was realy quick , direct form mdb to mysql

  3. Claus said,

    February 1, 2008 @ 19:55

    hello x2l2,

    kexi from http://www.kexi-project.org/ seems to be a very easy and user-friendly way to convert or migrate a microsoft access database (mdb) into a MySQL database or any other open source database.

  4. новини said,

    March 11, 2008 @ 0:30

    Thanks for this information. This was the thing I searched for. Is there a way to export all the tables from the .mdb at once?

  5. de musicas said,

    November 8, 2008 @ 12:24

    I’m from Brazil!!!
    very good!!!!

  6. Phil said,

    March 18, 2010 @ 0:30

    Just wanted to note that in the latest version of MDB Tools the environment variable is MDBICONV (no underscore).

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