[R-sig-Geo] Create ESRI personal geodatabase (.mdb) in R?

[Roger Bivand]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Mark Na wrote:

> Hello,
> I would like to write spatial data to an ESRI personal geodatabase (.mdb)
> and I wonder if anyone has experience with this.
>
> My workflow, at present, is as follows:
>
> 1. Read spatial data into R (from a .csv file).
>
> 2. Manipulate the data in various ways.
>
> 3. Export the data from R as a .csv file, import that into ArcGIS, add XY,
> save the data as a table in an existing personal geodatabase (.mdb).
>
> I would like to automate step 3 by creating the .mdb in R and saving various
> dataframes as tables within the .mdb, so nothing has to be done in ArcGIS.
>
> I would appreciate any help you might be able to provide with this.

This format is not available to others than ArcGIS license holders, who 
also run on Windows and have an Access license (it is an undocumented, 
custom Access database file). If you want to rebuild rgdal from source 
yourself with the Pgeo driver, or ensure that an Access DLL is visible to 
the driver, feel free to do so - hints are included in the README.windows 
file installed with rgdal. Since the Pgeo driver is read only, this only 
gets you so far. The format is closed (and very muddled, as browsing such 
a file will show), and best avoided in its entirety. Simply saving a few 
hundred point coordinates may run you up to hundreds of Kb.

Roger

>
> Many thanks, Mark
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-sig-Geo mailing list
> R-sig-Geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no