How to read a feature class in an Esri Personal GeoDatabase using R?

Question

I have feature classes in a personal geodatabase on a Win 8.1 machine (r 3.4.2, rgdal 1.2-15) and, as mentioned here, there is a requirement for Access users to also interact with them.

I have adjusted the code sample found here (which works perfectly for a file geodatabase):

require(rgdal)

# The input personal geodatabase
pgdb <- "C:/path/to/your/personalgeodatabase.mdb"

# Confirm the PGeo driver is available
subset(ogrDrivers(), grepl("PGeo", name))

Which returns:

   name                 long_name write  copy isVector
49 PGeo ESRI Personal GeoDatabase FALSE FALSE     TRUE

Then, at this point, ogrListLayers(dsn) fails:

# List all feature classes in a personal geodatabase
fc_list <- ogrListLayers(pgdb)

Error in ogrListLayers(pgdb) : Cannot open data source

I have tried adding path.expand:

fc_list <- ogrListLayers(path.expand(pgdb))

And I have also confirmed that for gdal (and so rgdal), that

Personal Geodatabases are accessed by passing the file name of the .mdb file to be accessed as the data source name. On Windows, no ODBC DSN is required.

I successfully accessed the feature classes using R-ArcGIS but that requires an ArcGIS licence, and so does not really solve the problem.

Suggestions?

Answer 1

EDIT: this answer is out of date, there is a 64-bit support for Access now, and rgdal is going to be defunct in a year or so.

You are on Windows so I will assume you are on a 64-bit machine, running 64-bit R by default.

Try using rgdal::ogrListLayers from the 32-bit version of R, you can find it in the x86 folder of the /bin/ folder - parallel to the one x64 one I presume you are running. (Right click on the R shortcut for Properties to find it, or use R.home and trace from there. )

I'm sure that's required for this driver, I always have to run this mode of R for RODBC for these files. It's kind of "well-known" in that experts-only way of these things :)