mio101/mdbread-alpine repository overview

⁠mdbread-alpine

Read data from MS Access MDB files by Python, only read, built on alpine⁠.

⁠Based on:

• MDB Tools⁠ MDB Tools is a set of programs to help you use Microsoft Access file in various settings.
• mdbread⁠ A simple Cython-based wrapper for the excellent MDBTools package to read data from MS Access MDB files.

Thanks these two amazing projects.

⁠What this project did

• Compile and install MDB Tools on alpine.
• Remove mdbread's DEPRECATED code, remove pandas for a smaller size image and easy to build, then install mdbread.

⁠Note

1. You can modify the file repositories to change the repositories of apk(Alpine Linux package management) for a faster download.
2. Mdbread use pandas (a famous python data analyis packages) to return DataFrame object, i remove the pandas to save about half size of this image(235MB > 123MB). If u need DataFrame object, u can modify mdbread/mdbread.pyx and Dockerfile to add pandas support, there's a tag⁠ in github that built with pandas, it would help.

⁠How to use

• Pull and test

  >> docker run mio101/mdbread-alpine python -c "import mdbread;print(mdbread)"
  
  Unable to find image 'mio101/mdbread-alpine:latest' locally
  latest: Pulling from mio101/mdbread-alpine
  2aecc7e1714b: Already exists
  665060bf69b5: Pull complete
  7d37ce5e6761: Pull complete
  24e603a66a49: Pull complete
  Digest: sha256:378300b9e6a7803907cda9fe7e98b2859e78ba1426cb76fd40eabd87d66bc36b
  Status: Downloaded newer image for mio101/mdbread-alpine:latest
  <module 'mdbread' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/mdbread.so'>
  

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  Notice the last line that printed info of module mdbread, it means that the mdbread module has been successfully loaded.

• mdbread Usage

  • From mdbread⁠

    >>> import mdbread
    >>> db = mdbread.MDB("MyDB.mdb")
    >>> print db.tables
    ["tbl1", "tbl2", "tbl3"]
    
    >>> tbl = db["tbl1"]
    >>> print tbl.columns
    ["foo","bar","baz"]
    

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    To get the data in a table, you have three options:

    mdbread.Table.records() returns a generator of dictionaries, where the keys are column names and the values are the data.

    iter(mdbread.Table) will return a namedtuple for each row. You can also use this form with for row in tbl:

    NOT SUPPORT IN THIS PROJECT: mdbread.Table.to_data_frame() will return a pandas DataFrame containing all the data for the entire table (possibly requiring lots of memory).

  • Tips

    mdbread.Table.records() and iter(mdbread.Table) will return a generator of namedtuple⁠, it's convenience to use for dealing with data, bravo :)