[mdb-dev] Having seg-fault problems when trying to export data

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Hi, all.

I've got a couple of questions for the community. I've been trying to
figure this out, and either I'm missing something, or there are some
problems with the 0.5-1 release... Here are my versions (on RedHat 8.0):

mdbtools-0.5-1
mdbtools-devel-0.5-1
mdbtools-gui-0.5-1
mdbtools-odbc-0.5-1

'mdb-ver' recognizes the file format:

(5:00pm) 3038>mdb-ver Replica63.mdb
JET4

Yet 'mdb-schema' doesn't seem to do anything different in outputting the
various backend formats that the man page claims:

(5:01pm) 3039>mdb-schema Replica63.mdb postgres > Replica63.postgres-schema
(5:01pm) 3040>mdb-schema Replica63.mdb > Replica63.access-schema
(5:02pm) 3042>mdb-schema Replica63.mdb sybase > Replica63.sybase-schema
(5:02pm) 3043>mdb-schema Replica63.mdb oracle > Replica63.oracle-schema
(5:03pm) 3044>ls -lt Replica63.*-schema
-rw-r--r--    1 salsbury users   19993 Nov  5 17:03 Replica63.oracle-schema
-rw-r--r--    1 salsbury users   19993 Nov  5 17:02 Replica63.sybase-schema
-rw-r--r--    1 salsbury users   19993 Nov  5 17:02 Replica63.access-schema
-rw-r--r--    1 salsbury users   19993 Nov  5 17:01 Replica63.postgres-sche=
ma
(5:03pm) 3045>diff Replica63.access-schema Replica63.postgres-schema
(5:04pm) 3046>diff Replica63.access-schema Replica63.sybase-schema
(5:04pm) 3047>diff Replica63.access-schema Replica63.oracle-schema
(5:04pm) 3048>=20

	...No answer on any diff. They're all the same. What gives?

	I can't find any doc for mdb-csvparse, other than the usage prompt,
but it seg faults on anything I feed it:

bootstrap(5:49pm) 3140>mdb-parsecsv
Usage: mdb-parsecsv <file> (assumed extension .txt)
bootstrap(5:49pm) 3141>mdb-parsecsv Customer_10-19-03.txt
Segmentation fault
=20
	mdb-tables can see the table names just fine:

(5:47pm) 3138>mdb-tables Replica63.mdb
activities antennas applicants Categories components Contacts Customers
Employees Employees1 Equipment frequencies inqiuiry Inventory Transactions=
=20
[...etc...]

	mdb-export segfaults, though...=20
Here's a snippet, trimming out the
personal data. It's failing near the end of what appears to be line 2:

(6:00pm) 3160>mdb-export Replica63.mdb Customers

	Here's part of line 1, headers:

CustomerID,Originated,EmployeeID,SalesAgent,Status,status
codes,Action,Depends On,
	[...yadda...]
Card,Longitude,s_GUID,Date Started Service,Gen_extended comments,extended
comments,Latitude,Aen_extended comments,s_ColLineage,s_Generation,s_Lineage
Reading LVAL page 0000f6
row num 0 row start 0 row stop 4095
	[What's this stuff? Successful completion of a row? Or something
odd?]

	Here's part of line 2, where it chokes:
[...],"Satisfied with DSL.","","",,"","","","","","",,,"",1,"",,1,,128,D=CB
Reading LVAL page 0000f6
row num 1 row start 9 row stop 0
Segmentation fault
(6:00pm) 3161>
=09
	Note that odd character at the end... Might that just be from some
odd character in the field? It seems to always fail at the DE(umlaut) in
multiple attempts. Is this one of those f'ed up Microsoft custom-font
things? Like when you get emails with \032 instead of apostrophes? I love
those. :-) I'm not so sure, though. I've been trying to dump other tables
than just "Customers", and they all seem to seg-fault on line 2. So either
we've got some royally messed-up data, or mdb-tools doesn't parse certain
things, or maybe some combination of both?

	I've been playing with this off-and-on for the past few weeks,
trying to find some way to get the data out of M$Access so I can import it
into MySQL or PostgreSQL. But so far I've dropped at least 7 hours (as time
permits) with frustrating results like these, and I'm not faring so well in
the "Open Source vs. Payware" argument wth my boss on this one. :-(=20

	Lately, he's trying to get me to install Access on my machine so we
can mail each other these huge replica files whenever one of us makes an
edit. (No thanks!) But at the same time, I'm not coming up with a workable
alternative.

	Any advice, pointers, or help? Is this toolkit still being actively
maintained? Should I be looking for some other tool?

	Thanks in advance! :-)

--=20
Pat
	   ___________________Think For Yourself____________________
	 Patrick G. Salsbury - http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/
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