Microsoft Access Reader/Writer

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Professional Edition.

The Microsoft® Access reader and writer provide FME with access to attribute data held in live Microsoft Access database tables. This data may not necessarily have a spatial component to it. FME provides read and write access to live Access databases via Microsoft’s ActiveX Data Objects (ADO).

Reader Overview

FME considers a database data set to be a collection of relational tables. The tables must be defined in the workspace before they can be read. Arbitrary where clauses and joins are fully supported.

Writer Overview

The writer stores attribute records into a live relational database, and provides the following capabilities:

  • Transaction Support: The Access writer provides transaction support that eases the data loading process. Occasionally, a data load operation terminates prematurely due to data difficulties. The transaction support provides a mechanism for reloading corrected data without data loss or duplication.
  • Table Creation: The Access writer uses the information within the FME mapping file to automatically create database tables as needed.
  • Writer Mode Specification: The Access writer allows the user to specify what database command should be issued for each feature received. Valid writer modes are INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. The writer mode can be specified at three unique levels: at the writer level, on the feature type, or on individual features.

Note: Only the standard SQL wildcard characters (% and _) are supported for SQL LIKE queries. Microsoft Access wildcard characters (*, ?, and #) are not supported.

Tip: The SQLCreator and SQLExecutor transformers allow arbitrary Structured Query Language (SQL) statements to be executed against any database.