[mdb-dev] mdb-schema field size

[Michael D. P. <ra...@dr...>]

I am using mdb-schema to export an Access 2000 database.  All is working 
well expect the field sizes of the text fields are all twice as large as 
they should be in the mdb-schema output.  For example, I have two text 
fields, one length 5 and the other 255 as reported by Access.  However, the 
schema output (mysql backend) is:

DROP TABLE Table1;
CREATE TABLE Table1
  (
         TextField5                      varchar (10),
         TextField255                    varchar (510)
);

The content of the test file is (mdb-export):
TextField5,TextField255
"abcde","LotsOfData"

Is this a bug?  A character set issue?  Is there a work-around already 
designed into mdbtools?  The problem is that MySQL doesn't like the varchar 
fields being larger than 255 (it wants a BLOB instead) when importing the 
schema file.  Also, it allocates twice the size than necessary.  When 
viewing the .mdb file with a hex editor all the field contents are contiguous:

    1afe0  00 00 02 00 ff fe 61 62  63 64 65 ff fe 4c 6f 74  ......abcde..Lot
    1aff0  73 4f 66 44 61 74 61 15  00 09 00 02 00 02 00 03  sOfData.........

Therefore, there doesn't seem to be a reason why the size should come up 
double what Access says it is, unless I'm misunderstanding something here 
(entirely possible...).

I have recreated this problem using a very simple Access database generated 
from scratch (above).  I have also tried using mdbtools compiled on 
Cygwin(Win2k) and Linux, both from the CVS sources, with the same 
results.  The field sizes are also independent of the backend selected in 
mdb-schema.

Thanks for the help,
Michael