[R-sig-Geo] Building Windows binary of rgdal package to include PGeo driver for reading ESRI personal geodatabases.

[Obrien, Josh]

>> On Tue, 31 Jan 2012, Obrien, Josh wrote:

>> I am a long-time R user, currently working with a team of ArcGIS users. 
>> The GIS guys would like to be able pass me data in the form of ESRI 
>> personal geodatabases (*.mdb), but the OGR driver that reads such files 
>> (PGeo) is not included in the Windows rgdal binary.
>>
>> Roger Bivand's 2008 book (p 111) and the "README.windows" file located 
>> in rgdal's main directory both have the same advice for me. They tell me 
>> that "the R Windows binary rgdal package can be built against an FWTools 
>> binary, using VC++."

> Josh,
> 
> Could you please try to install R-devel for Windows:
> 
> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rdevel.html
> 
> and install the CRAN binary of rgdal? Prof. Brian Ripley and Uwe Ligges 
> have been continuing their excellent support for us and the whole 
> community, and as part of build train enhancements for forthcoming 2.15 on 
> Windows, have built GDAL with more dependencies, including ODBC. For me on 
> R-devel, ogrDrivers() now shows:
> 
> 23   MapInfo File  TRUE
> 24         Memory  TRUE
> 25   MSSQLSpatial  TRUE
> 26           ODBC  TRUE
> 27        OpenAir FALSE
> 28         PCIDSK  TRUE
> 29            PDS FALSE
> 30         PGDump  TRUE
> 31           PGeo FALSE
> 
> where FALSE means that the driver cannot write Pgeo files. It would be 
> helpful if you could try it out, which may well mean finding out how to 
> declare the Pgeo data source through ODBC or some such.
> 
> If you can find out how to use the driver, it may be simpler to go with 
> 2.15 as Devel will become, most likely in April 2012, than try to build 
> using FWTools or OSGeo4W.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Roger

Dear Professor Bivand,

That's phenomenally helpful. 

For the record, after installing R-devel (soon to be R-2.15.0) from http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rdevel.html, the following steps were the only ones needed to read data from an ESRI personal geodatabase into an R SpatialPointsDataFrame. (The table to be read is named "TelemetryPoints", and is stored in the personal geodatabase at "C://temp/example.mdb"):

install.packages("rgdal") 
library(rgdal)
ogrDrivers()      # Confirming that the PGeo driver was indeed installed
SPDF <- readOGR("C://temp/example.mdb", "Telemetry points") 

Thanks so much for your help,

Josh O'Brien

P.S. Not sure I yet have the hang of properly quoting the context from previous emails in the thread.