Thinking about ZI/Intergraphs Geomedia/Geomedia Pro

If by long binaries you mean from an ESRI Personal Geodatabase, then I *think* you’re out of luck. ESRI hasn’t released any specs on personal or file geodatabases, so they’re pretty well locked up. ESRI first talked about making an open API to personal and file geodatabases in 2006, but to my knowledge that hasn’t happened yet. OGR seems to be able to do it, so they must have reverse engineered it somehow:

http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_pgeo.html

Other than that, I haven’t seem an open source products that can touch it.

We regularly use Talend for a wide variety of data tasks. Your paragraph “…Sometimes I get it as a text file, sometimes I have to scrape it off a SQL Server, and sometimes I have to drag it kicking and screaming out of an Access database (I use the term “database” for this last item very loosely). ” sums up the ease of connectivity and very straightforward transforms well.

But the tools really come into their own when data requires cleansing, complex matching, de-duplication, and tasks of such complexity that scripting just couldn’t possibly be a cost-effective approach. These tools allow tasks which would take weeks to do by scripting to be done in hours.

Mainly I want to be able to extract everything from an mdb to a better and more “friendly” format (like SQLite or something). The problem is that some of the fields are described as “long binaries” – for instance the Geometry- fields describing the objects themselves. Do you have any clue on how to “deciphre” this “long binary” field into the correct object itself or do you need to know the underlying structure completely?