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

[Roger Bivand]

On Sat, 24 Oct 2009, Dan Putler wrote:

> Hi Edzer,
>
> I've sent an email on this topic to the gdal-dev mailing list. I would
> argue that the "standard" build of GDAL/OGR on Windows is what Frank W.
> releases in FWTools, so I asked about whether the two drivers are
> included in the current Windows FWTools build of the GDAL/OGR library.

No, the OSGEO4W build is what is intended to be provided. While 
spatialLite involves very limited external dependencies, PostGIS involves 
very extensive dependencies and versioning challenges, and running a 
PostgreSQL server is not anything working researchers want or need to do, 
in my experience. It may be that users should be encouraged to learn SQL 
and database administration, but I don't think that this is considered a 
key priority.

Building rgdal for Windows automatically is hard, and users owe a big debt 
of gratitude to Uwe Ligges for the extensive help he offers. As built, 
rgdal on Windows will work for the read-only Pgeo driver if the user has 
an Access license and appropriate DLL. The package does include detailed 
instructions for those who need to use other drivers, both via FWTools and 
OSGEO4W. This is very extensive web of dependencies is not, however, 
anything that most users need to be confronted with. "Dependency Hell" is 
so-called for good reason, hard to install, hard to manage and maintain, 
and certainly not portable.

> My guess is that the active people on this thread are also on the
> gdal-dev list, but I'll still provide a summary to what I here back to
> this list.

You may find that the overlap is rather limited ...

Roger

>
> Dan
>
> On Sat, 2009-10-24 at 11:28 +0200, Edzer Pebesma wrote:
>> I tend to also favour those two -- postgis for the data base,
>> spatialLite for the file-based exchange -- as the way forward. Do
>> "standard" gdal/ogr installations on windows (whatever that means) come
>> with support for sqlite and postgis, so that ogr2ogr takes you from one
>> to another?
>> --
>> Edzer
>>
>> Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>>> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 8:56 PM, Dan Putler <dan.putler at sauder.ubc.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Roger,
>>>>
>>>> A bit off-topic, but what do you think will be the real replacement for
>>>> the shapefile as the de facto standard vector file format? SpatialLite?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>  Some thoughts on that here:
>>>
>>> http://moreati.org.uk/blog/2009/03/01/shapefile-20-manifesto/
>>> http://www.spatialdbadvisor.com/blog/121/the-shapefile-manifesto/
>>>
>>> SpatialLite is very nice looking - I might start working with it as my
>>> default file-based GIS data storage. For database storage I'm using
>>> PostGIS.
>>>
>>> Barry
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> R-sig-Geo mailing list
>>> R-sig-Geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
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>>>
>>
>

-- 
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