I am currently working on a DB API for a Java application, and one of the requests was to be able to query Microsoft Access Databases. OK, no problem I thought. I could easily open up these databases with OpenOffice.org Database or even Kexi. WRONG! Neither of them would open or even import the database. I personally am not a fan of OO.o, so I went over with Kexi. After some fiddling around, I did apt-cache search mdb just to see what there was. Low and behold there were two applications of interest. kexi-mdb-driver and kexi-mdb-plugin. I first tried the plugin and all that did was make Kexi crash. So I removed the plugin and then tried to use the driver instead. Booyah! It worked like a champ. It imported not only the structure 100% correctly, but also all of the data.

/me gets back to hacking now that he knows what is in the database itself. </query_hell>