MDB Driver Integration
Introduction
There's child workspace dedicated to integrate the not-yet-ready MDB database driver - that is, a database driver providing access to Microsoft Access databases - into the main OpenOffice.org codeline. This page serves as repository for all kind of information around this driver and the CWS.
open issues
Currently, the driver (as to be found in the CWS, which is more advanced than the version on the DBA pages) has the following problems:
- ASCII-strings only
If you have a string containing non-ASCII characters, those will be represented by garbage in OOo.
- picture columns containing garbage
Columns containing pictures are reported as string columns, with the result that garbage is displayed in OOo
- all columns reported as string columns
All columns of a MSA table are reported being string columns (being of type LONGVARCHAR, more precisely). This yields problems for structured data: For instance, imagine a date column containing the 1st January 2006. By the driver, this value will be reported as 01/01/06. Since the user does not have any chance to determine that this is a date column really, interpretation of the value is pretty difficult (up to impossible). Not to mention that the US-localization of the date is inappropriate for a international product such as OpenOffice.org, or that omitting the century makes the data effectively useless, since you cannot tell whether it's 2006 or 1906 or whatever year.
