I need a little help. A client of mine has an old btrieve program that some some data in it he would like converted to a dbf file he has. I have tried butils.exe to extract data thru the -SAVE function. I returns garbage. I have tried btsearch but under the description section is only gives half file names and no records. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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btrieve/N version 5.10 dos exporting from
- Thread starter Pollock
- Start date
BUTIL -SAVE doesn't return garbage unless the file is corrupted. What BUTIL-SAVE does return is a byte image of the record. Btrieve does not store field meta data so, typically, only the application knows the structure of the record. If you know the structure of the data, you can create DDFs so you can use ODBC.
Having not worked with Btsearch, I can't say why it would return only half of the files.
info@mirtheil.com
Custom VB and Btrieve development.
Certified Pervasive Developer
Certified Pervasive Technician
Having not worked with Btsearch, I can't say why it would return only half of the files.
info@mirtheil.com
Custom VB and Btrieve development.
Certified Pervasive Developer
Certified Pervasive Technician
- Thread starter
- #3
Well, first you're going to need to get a newer version of Btrieve/Pervasive. Btrieve 5.10 was DOS, Win16, NetWare, and OS/2 only. To use ODBC you're going to need a 32 bit version. The current version is Pervasive.SQL V8 and a trial version is available for download from Once you've got that, then you can use either the Create Table WIzard or SQL statements to create tables. If you use SQL statements, make sure to turn off TrueNullCreates by issuing:
Set TrueNullCreate=Off
before issuing any Create Table SQL statements. This will prevent an extra byte from being inserted into the table defintion. You'll also want to use the "USING" and "IN DICTIONARY" clause so you're only affecting the DDFs and not the data files.
info@mirtheil.com
Custom VB and Btrieve development.
Certified Pervasive Developer
Certified Pervasive Technician
Set TrueNullCreate=Off
before issuing any Create Table SQL statements. This will prevent an extra byte from being inserted into the table defintion. You'll also want to use the "USING" and "IN DICTIONARY" clause so you're only affecting the DDFs and not the data files.
info@mirtheil.com
Custom VB and Btrieve development.
Certified Pervasive Developer
Certified Pervasive Technician
If you need to export to dbf you can take a look at BtSearch at If you do not have the DDF files which are the data dictionary files it also allows you to analzye the structure and build the DDf files.
Gil
Gil
The garbage seen using BUTIL -Save may just be binary data, not necessarily corrupt data. Binary data can have code for carriage return/line feed which may wreak havoc with most text editors. The .def files may equate to Btrieve description files which are used with the BUTIL -Create function. They can provide some information about the record length and keys within the data. You do need to create ddf's to map all field data. BTSearch attempts to generate DDF's from the database by attempting to isolate fields.
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