Whats the best way to read a .mdb file?

Im trying to read a .mdb file but i cant seem to get it to work without access can anyone help ?

MDB Tools should probably work. It reads the Microsoft Access database file format directly and doesn’t require Access.

They have an ODBC driver, so accessing it from Python should work through pyodbc.

im on a window and i cant seem to get the mbd tools working

If you’re on Windows, you can install Microsoft’s Access Database Engine Redistributable to get just the database driver without a full Access install.

Note that there’s a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version, so you need to choose the appropriate one for your system.

See the pyodbc documentation on connecting to Access for more details.