Converted Data, Now What Do I Do With It? 1

[ClementsK]

The pain associated with converting a FoxPro 2.6 database has subsided and I am starting to feel the pain from a new problem. When I converted the FoxPro database, I expected to import lots of tables from what the user called a database. Instead, I have one table, 60+ fields and 5000+ records.

How do I proceed from here? It is obvious to me, that out of the 60+ field, I can create approximately 4 tables.

Can anyone offer me some advice? I want to deliver a good product to my end users.

Kim

 

[JimHorton]

Kim
You're sure it's one table only? FoxPro is different from access in that where Access has a single file containing all the tables, forms, etc., foxpro has many .dbf files, one for each table, often with an index file with an extension like...(it's been a long time...fpt?, mdx? whatever).

If you're sure you've got the only file, and it's a 'flat file', then it's going to be a bunch of queries to break that out into a 'normalized' (non-'flat file') database.

The bad news is that no one here could tell you what to do without knowing the fields in that table and if possible a general description of what the field is. In general, the quick-and-dirty way would be to identify the 'unique' fields, and for each field or set of fields that constitute a 'unique' key for some chunk of information, you'd make an aggregate query (Group By) with group by on those fields, then turn that into a Make Table query. You may find several groups of fields to break out with a group-by query on a particular set of fields. Then take the result tables and put indexes on them (the fields in the group-by clause would be a good canditate for PrimaryKey).

If there aren't to many fields you could post them here, and the members could take a crack at it, but still, without knowing the business rules of the old foxpro db, it would only be an educated guess.
--Jim

 

[ClementsK]

Thanks Jim, I really appreciate your explanation. Yes, I am sure that it is only one table.

I will get started this morning on the queries and hopefully, everything will work just fine.

Once again, thanks for your explanation.

Kim