Using Python to discriminate Personal Geodatabases and MS Access Databases

Question

I need to list a server's geodatabases, to analyze and process them. My users are however creating both personal geodatabases and MS Access geodatabases.

Listing mdb files reports both types of databases, I woudl like to narrow the list down to geodatabases only. The boolean workspace property is_geodatabase would be exactly what I need to use, as it indicates whether a database is spatially enabled or not. Unfortunately, this property is only available for SDE databases.

I am using ArcGIS 10.0. and the script below. The choice was made to list mdb files by extension using os.walk() rather than arcpy.ListWorkspaces() for speed of process, and because ListWorkspaces retrieves MS Access databases anyway. How can I amend my script to report only personal geodatabases, and not flat MS acess databases?

for path, subdirs, files in os.walk(analyzed_root_folder):          
    for x in files:        
        if x.lower().endswith(".mdb") == True:
            ext_mdb.append( os.path.join(path, x))

Answer 1

Check it with odbc and search if database contain table starting with GDB_

import pyodbc

db_file = "C:/path/to/my/database/MyDataBase.mdb"
user = ''
password = ''
odbc_conn_str = 'DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};DBQ=%s;UID=%s;PWD=%s' % \
                (db_file, user, password)
cnxn = pyodbc.connect(odbc_conn_str)
cursor = cnxn.cursor()
if cursor.tables(table='GDB_GeomColums').fetchone():
   print('This is ArcGIS Personal Geodatabase')

del cursor 
cnxn.close()