[R] Access Data Base Reading on Linux Platform

[Lorenzo Isella]

Dear All,
I am really far from a database expert (I do prefer flat files as long as
that is reasonable), but I have to deal with an accdb database (Microsoft
Access new format). It all stems from the fact that I run R almost
exclusively on Debian platforms.
I did a bit of googling

http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/How-to-load-data-from-accdb-into-R-td4656613.html

http://rprogramming.net/connect-to-ms-access-in-r/

https://www.r-bloggers.com/getting-access-data-into-r/

but it seems you cannot go very far unless you can install some microsoft
drivers on your platform.
Hence, my two questions

1) Can I read (I do not need write permissions) an accdb database on linux
using R without resorting to WINE?

2) If 1) is cumbersome, to what R friendly format (excluding for now a csv
dump) I can convert the data base? If this is doable entirely in Linux?
Otherwise, worse comes to worse, how to make this one time conversion from
Windows? I read there are ways from Access to convert everything to mdb,
which should be more R friendly, but I need the opinion of someone more
experienced than me here.

Many thanks

Lorenzo

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