Hi chicago928,

If I read your question(s) right, what you are looking for is a generic way to get a list of table names (and column names) from an access database so you can dump each table to a csv file, right?

There are several ways you can get this info without changing permissions on a db's system tables. One way is to use the DBI's table_info method.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;

my $db = "c:\\db.mdb";
my $datasource = "driver=Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb);dbq=$db";

my $dbh = DBI->connect( "dbi:ODBC:$datasource", '', '',
                         { RaiseError => 1 } );

my $sth = $dbh->table_info( '', '', '', 'TABLE' );
while ( my ( undef, undef, $name ) = $sth->fetchrow_array() ) {
    print "$name:\n";
    my $colsth = $dbh->column_info( '', '', $name, '' );
    while ( my (undef, undef, undef, $col_name ) = $colsth->fetchrow_a
+rray() ) {
        print "\t$col_name\n";
    }
}
[download]

Access system tables (MSys*) have a type of "SYSTEM TABLE", regular tables have type "TABLE", and queries have type "VIEW". The fourth parameter to table_info allows you to filter the results, and I chose to display only the regular tables.

This all assumes you are on Win32. You can find more info on table_info and col_info at DBI. You might also be interested in DBI recipes.