Marc Santhoff wrote: > > I wonder if this difficulties are > - a special problem using ubuntu > - only occur when copying from .mdb > - or are similar when using other database types > > Anyone having similar experiences not using an access database? > > Marc
Hi Marc, Just a quick and dirty outline from my point of view. Ubuntu's community built of OOo includes the (still experimantal) mdb-sdbc driver. It allows read-only access to tables and some SELECT queries. Nothing special, but limited. Many users want to convert their old Access databases to something usable (writable, with relations) when they move over from Windows to Linux. At the current stage this requires a transfer to some other db-engine, let's say OOo's native hsqldb. Our office provides drag&drop or copy&paste import, which pops up a wizzard. That wizzard has some problems related to date conversion. I remember an error message like "Could not insert value "03/28/1999 00:00:00" due to conversion error....", where the date was obviously a US-American one, including a zero time fraction. The source was MSAccess. I used Ubuntu's built of 2.0.2 at that time. Another issue is an offset by two days when you import dates from numeric spreadsheet cells. You should substract "2" or convert to ISO strings before transfer. Hsql import through csv requires at least two more or less complex SQL commands. You have to be aware of all kinds of delimiters and -of course- date strings. No matter what kind of import you succeed with, you get unrelated tables without auto-increment fields. Setting an existing field to "auto-increment" will create a new field from scratch with new values, not nessesarily matching with other tables' foreign keys. It is up to the "typically unexperienced MSAccess user" to create new auto-ids, matching with foreign keys in other tables. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
