topic Re: Accessing MICROSOFT ACCESS through SAS in SAS Programming

Accessing MICROSOFT ACCESS through SAS

Xiaoningdemao — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:09:49 GMT

Dear All,

I just have one question in general. Can i read in a access file in SAS while I don't have MICROSOFT ACCESS installed?

I tried using libname satement and import, neither worked.

Thank you!

Best wishes.

Re: Accessing MICROSOFT ACCESS through SAS

Reeza — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:46:20 GMT

AFAIK you don't need Access to read an Access DB.

Post the code you've tried and the errors you've received.

Re: Accessing MICROSOFT ACCESS through SAS

RW9 — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 08:42:56 GMT

Right, this is something I have been trying recently. You need something available to read it, be that the Office suite, ACE ODBC driver, PCFiles Server etc. If the file is old, MDB then its even more of a pain, bit incompatabilities etc. We had to get an old version of Access and upgrade the version of those files. Simply put, if you use M$ products you are tied into their software. A final option, you could look at OpenOffice, LibreOffice, they tend to have parsers that can read files from Office. Don't know how good they are for Access.

There is however one other option that I found, its called youaccess, a command line tool which can dump the data out from MDB files to CSV:

http://youaccess.sourceforge.net/

It doesn't get the metadata (i.e. the structure of the data) as that is held very awkwardly in MDB, however you can get the data out.