polars_access_mdbtools

A library for reading tables from an Access database into Polars dataframes, using mdbtools

What is this?

A tiny, subprocess-based tool for reading a MS Access database (.rdb) as a Python Polars Dataframe.

Installation

To read the database, this package thinly wraps MDBTools.

If you are on OSX, install it via Homebrew:

$ brew install mdbtools

If you are on Debian, install it via apt:

$ sudo apt install mdbtools

If you are on Windows, it's a little tougher. Install mdbtools for Windows. Manually add to PATH.

1. Download the mdb-tools files from Windows link above. Visit the Releases section, then downloadi the part that says "Source Code (zip)".
2. Extract that to somewhere like C:/bin/mdbtools-win/mdbtools-win-1.0.0.
3. Follow these instructions to add that folder to your environment path (Method 1, but use the path to the mdbtools executable files).
4. Restart your computer or just close and re-open the program you're running it from. You can test that it works by opening a terminal and running mdb-tables --help and see that it doesn't fail.

Finally, on all OS's:

$ pip install polars_access_mdbtools

Example Usage

import polars as pl
import polars_access_mdbtools as pl_access

file_path = 'path_to_file.mdb'
pl_access.list_table_names(file_path)

df = pl_access.read_table(file_path, table_name='your_table_name')

Acknowledgements

This code is based heavily on jbn's pandas_access library.

To Do

• unit tests
• better error messages when subsections (e.g., schema fetching) fail

Contributing

Please Star this repo.

Please submit bug reports as GitHub Issues. Feel free to submit a PR to fix an issue!