[Freegis-list] Re: [gislist] Translator for ESRI geodatabase format

[Bill Thoen]

Wow, that problem got solved fast!  I really like this idea of open 
source tools more and more!! The MapInfo-L list has been ranting all 
morning about the problems of translating geodatabase formats so I think 
this news will cheer them up.

- Bill Thoen

Frank Warmerdam wrote:

>A consortium of uses recently funded me to implement read-only
>support for ESRI Personal Geodatabases.   All you need is the
>normal Microsoft Access ODBC driver - no ESRI software.
>
>This is built into the latest FWTools builds from:
>  http://fwtools.maptools.org/
>
>You could translate all the layers in a personal geodatabase
>to a directory of shapefiles like this (from the FWTools Shell):
>
>  ogr2ogr out_shape_dir mydata.mdb
>
>Some info on the driver is available at:
>
>  http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_pgeo.html
>
>The "Shape" column is reported as an OLE object but if read
>as a BLOB it matches the geometry format that appears in the .shp
>file of a shapefile.
>  
>