Connect to MS Access w/o ODBC, DSN, from Win32

[chiller]

I have been reading thru the articles w/r/t ADO and ODBC and getting thoroughly confused.

Is this even possible? I need to connect to a Microsoft Access database on an NT machine without an ODBC Data Source control panel. I cannot set up a DSN. This is not the way I'd like it, but for paranoid security reasons, that is just the way it is.

I have looked at Win32::OLE and DBI::ADO and these all seem to require a DSN. I cannot use any ODBC anything, for obvious reasons.

Short of redesigning the Access DB to export information to CSV, what are possible solutions?

Thanks.

[Kanji]

DBD::ODBC (alt.) has supported DSN-less connections for awhile.

From the POD...

Connect without DSN
The ability to connect without a full DSN is introduced in version 0.21. Example (using MS Access):

my $DSN = 'driver=Microsoft Access Driver(*.mdb);dbq=\\\\cheese\\g$\\p
+erltest.mdb';
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:$DSN", '','') or die "$DBI::errstr\n"
+;

    --k.

[chiller]

Thanks, all. I tried the suggestions, but I get this error:

DBI->connect(driver=Microsoft Access Driver *.mdb);dbq=\\SERVER\My_Dat
+abase.mdb) failed: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Invalid string or
+ buffer length (SQL-S1090)(DBD: db_login/SQLConnect err=-1) at connec
+t.pl line 7 [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Invalid string or buffer
+ length (SQL-S1090)(DBD: db_login/SQLConnect err=-1)

(What I am attempting to do is: get table from Access DB on Novell server, determine if Access DB in local machine in the same version, then copy a new version to the local machine if there has been an update... sounds easy enough.)

[mortis]

On Win32 you can connect directly to the access mdb file, but it still is through DBD::ODBC. The following code is a summarizaion of code I've used to manipulate pre-existing ms access databases:

use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;
my $file = 'c:/path/to/access/database.mdb';
my $dsn = 'dbi:ODBC:driver=Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb);dbq=' . $fi
+le;
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn,undef,undef);

I'm not 100% sure this will solve your immediate problems, but it has worked for me when there was no system wide DSN for the access database. I do beleive this solution is documented somewhere in the DBI/DBD pod documentation.

Also, for the creation of a new MDB file (which you can't otherwise do without resorting to Win32 calls or ADO), I created a simple empty database with Access, and then serialized it using MIME::Base64 and stuffed the serialized version into a module so it was easy to just create a new blank db:

use strict;
use warnings;
use BlankMDB;
BlankMDB->writeToFile('c:/path/to/file.mdb');

[strat]

You could create and delete DSNs on the fly; have a look at DSN's at Re: DSN's. But I prefer the the two other possibilities given here until now...

Best regards,
perl -e "print a|r,p|d=>b|p=>chr 3**2 .7=>t and t"

Edit ar0n -- Changed text link to node link