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I'm a I've just inherited a pile of institutional geodata that's stored in an MS Access database. I need to pull that data out into a format that I can work with in GeoDjango--so I'm OK with shapefiles or exporting it directly to a more useful database (mysql or postgres). What's the best way to do that? I'm a GIS newb, so I'm hoping there's an easy solution here.

I can get access to an ArcGIS install to work with the data if necessary.

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Does the MS Access data contain the spatial information, or are these just attributes related to the spatial data? – djq Nov 8 '11 at 21:53
@celenius The database contains spacial data--there is a long binary column in each table called "shape", I believe. – Michael C. O'Connor Nov 8 '11 at 22:00
Do you know what software created the Access DB? If you open MS Access, are there a bunch of "GDB_" Tables? This likely means it is an ESRI Geodatabase. More than likely its ESRI, but Geomedia (and likely others) also use MS Access to store spatial data. If you find a GDB_ReleaseInfo table, open it and the "Minor" field should tell you which 9.x GDB version it is. If GDB_ReleaseInfo is missing, it is likely a 10.x GDB. – RyanDalton Nov 8 '11 at 22:31
@RyanDalton My understanding is that the data was generated in ArcGIS, and there are a bunch of GDB_* tables. I don't see GDB_ReleaseInfo, but there is a GDB_Release table with one row (Major,Minor,Bugfix):(1,1,0). – Michael C. O'Connor Nov 8 '11 at 22:45
It likely means then that it is an ESRI 8.1 geodatabase. That should help others in suggesting appropriate solutions. – RyanDalton Nov 8 '11 at 22:50

3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

You could probably migrate your data out of the Personal Geodatabase and directly into PostGIS using ogr2ogr, which supports both Personal Geodatabase and PostGIS file formats.

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up vote 2 down vote

I am about to play around with GeoKettle http://www.spatialytics.org/projects/geokettle/ this perfoms ETL on various datasets, the data I have is in CSV, so I would imagine that if Geokettle does not natively support Access you can dump it to csv.

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up vote 2 down vote

As Ryan Dalton said you can use OGR2OGR. The FWTools binaries for windows seem to have ESRI Personal Geodatabase support built in. You can easily export data using the following command:

ogr2ogr -f "PostgreSQL" PG:"host=localhost user=someuser dbname=somedb password=somepassword port=5432" C:\GISData\Geonames.mdb -a_srs EPSG:26986

CREDITS: the above information has been taken from bostongis.com, scroll down to 'ESRI GeoDatabase (MDB format)' for the relevant section.

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