Some of the data I’ve been dealing with lately is in Microsoft Access databases (.mdb files). I’ve been surprised with the lack of support for manipulating these files outside of Access. There are a couple solutions, but nothing satisfied me needs. The worst data set came to me in a few hundred different .mdb files. It looked like the person that exported the database exported a copy of the database for each unique facility. So each facility had a file, but the schema for each file was exactly the same. It was apparent that in order to do any sort of complex queries on the data, the files would have to be combined. I was recommended a tool called mdbtools by somebody at a local Ruby meetup. I ended up using this along with Ruby inside of a Rake task to convert all my .mdb files into a single MySQL database. (more…)