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Technical review: Adequate ODBC alternative for free Java client for MS Access

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Jackcess: http://jackcess.sourceforge.net/

I thought I'd throw it out there, maybe save someone else some pain.

You may find yourself in the situation where some system maintains its 
data in an MS Access MDB, and that's not going to change any time soon. 
If, as is not uncommon, the MDB is on a Windows share and your Java 
client code is on UNIX or Linux, *and* your first attempts are with 
MDBTools and unixODBC, the odds are pretty good that you'll run into a 
file locking problem ("Can't alloc filename"; strace will indicate this 
happens right after a futex() call).

I ran into this yesterday, and any amount of suggested tweaking of 
smb.conf and of MS Access itself (and bear in mind you may not be able 
to do the latter in some production situations) failed.

You'll typically confirm the problem by having no issues with your 
client code if the MDB is local. Then ODBC and by extension JDBC+ODBC 
works just fine.

Another free alternative is odbtp but that (unless you're writing PHP) 
means installing a package on the MS Access machine, the client library 
has a C API, and hence we're talking JNI.

So with some considerable skepticism I gave Jackcess a try. Turned out 
to be rock-solid. Don't expect to be doing JDBC in this situation, nor 
JPA - the API is completely different - but it's surprisingly powerful.

AHS

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Technical review: Adequate ODBC alternative for free Java client for MS Access Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2012-11-29 06:41 -0400

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