[Freegis-list] ESRI MDB yet to be decoded?

[Frank Warmerdam]

Ben Discoe wrote:
> I've often wondered why ESRI's Arc products are not more interoperable with
> the rest of the software world.  After all, some degree of sharing should be
> possible by reading their formats.  Today, i encountered this info:
> 
> "ESRI software writes coordinate data to the ESRI MDB Geodatabase as a
> Binary Long Data type in an unpublished binary encoding manner, the
> functionality required to access such a data type is still to be
> developed.."
> 
> I am curious if this is still true - free software cannot adopt/interoperate
> with "Geodatabases" because some required reverse engineering has yet to be
> done?

Ben,

The binary long data type is just a fragment of the same geometry format
used in the shapefile format.  This fall support for Geodatabase (via
ODBC) was added in OGR with no need for ESRI software installed on the
system.  Just using the normal mdb odbc drivers available on windows.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, 
warmerdam at pobox.com
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and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent