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

[Dan Putler]

The response I got from the gdal-dev list is that starting in GDAL/OGR
1.6.0 there is a read-only driver or SpatiaLite files, and that there is
currently a working read and write driver for SpatiaLite in the GDAL/OGR
1.7.0 SVN. OSGEO4W currently has the default install GDAL/OGR 1.5.4, but
GDAL/OGR 1.6.0 as an advanced install option. Eventually the SpatialLite
read/write capability for GDAL/OGR will make it to OSGEO4W, so it is
something of a moot point now.

Dan

On Sat, 2009-10-24 at 23:52 +0200, Roger Bivand wrote:
> 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
> >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo
> >>>
> >>
> >
> 
-- 
Dan Putler
Sauder School of Business
University of British Columbia