How to access config or metdata outside Grails controller?

grailsApplication is injected in controllers and service classes only. To access config and metadata from other classes, use ConfigurationHolder and ApplicationHolder respectively.

Reference: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS-2545

Convert MDB file in Linux

I have some old, standalone Java projects which used Access MDB file as database. As I have always wanted to use an installation-free database for my application, I was looking for ways to convert the data in the MDB file to HSQLDB. I choose HSQLDB because it's simple to use and cross platform.

I started off researching with unixODBC but ended up installing odbcinst. Eventually I stumbled upon mdbtools. That solves my problem. After installating mdbtools on my Ubuntu laptop, I exported the schema

mdb-schema data.mdb > schema.sql

I edited the schema to HSQLDB syntax and created the new database in HSQLDB.

Then, I only need to do

mdb-export -I data.mdb table | sed -e "s/)$/);/" > table.sql

for each of the tables in the MDB file. The sed command is to append a ';' as mdb-export doesn't end the insert statements with ';'.

I then edit the INSERT statements and run them in HSQLDB.

This is simpler than most of the other approaches I have read on the web.