Access files (mdb files) are collections of several relations, also known as tables. Tables can be either user tables storing user data, or system tables storing information such as forms, queries or the relationships between the tables.
It is possible to get a listing with the names of all tables stored in
a mdb file by calling mdb2rec in the following way:
$ mdb2rec -l sales.mdb Customers Products Orders
So sales.mdb stores user information in the tables Customers, Products and Orders. If we want to include system tables in the listing we can use the ‘-s’ command line option:
$ mdb2rec -s -l sales.mdb MSysObjects MSysACEs MSysQueries MSysRelationships Customers Products Orders
The tables with names starting with MSys are system tables.
The data stored in those tables is either not relevant to the recutils
user (used by the Access program to create forms and the like) or is
used in an indirect way by mdb2rec (such as the information
from MSysRelationships).
Let’s read some data from the mdb file. We can get the relation of Products in rec format:
$ mdb2rec sales.mdb Products %rec: Products %type: ProductID int %type: ProductName size 80 %type: Discontinued bool ProductID: 1 ProductName: GNU generation T-shirt Discontinued: 0 ...
A record descriptor is created for the record set containing the
generated records, called Products. As seen in the example, mdb2rec is
able to generate type information for the fields. The list of
customers is similar:
$ mdb2rec sales.mdb Customers %rec: Customers %type: CustomerID size 4 %type: CompanyName size 80 %type: ContactName size 60 CustomerID: GSOFT CompanyName: GNU Soft ContactName: Jose E. Marchesi ...
If no table is specified in the invocation to mdb2rec all
the tables in the file are processed, with the exception of the system
tables, which requires ‘-s’ to be used:
$ mdb2rec sales.mdb %rec: Products ... %rec: Customers ... %rec: Orders ...