Export data from DOS Btrieve 5.00 rec.man. how?

[IngmarWaller]

Hi all,

I've got a Btrieve database installed on my machine with Btrieve 5.00 loaded. I can easely use the utility BUTIL.
However, it's not handy when trying toe export all data to a txt file.

BUTIL only exports the data without columheaders or field seperators

I'm a VB.NET programmer and i'm trying to collect the data via a .Net solution. Can anybody ive me advice on how to connect to this Btrieve receord manager via .Net

Thanks in advance!!!
Ingmar Waller
ingmar@starware.nl

 

[mirtheil]

Btrieve 5.00 for DOS was released in 1990 (or earlier). There is no way to directly use that engine from anything even remotely current.

You might consider upgrading to Pervasive.SQL V8 or V9 (current version). There is a trial version at

http://www.pervasive.com/downloads).

With V8/V9 as long as you've got DDFs, you can use ODBC, OLEDB, or Managed ADO.NET from VB.NET easily.
If you need DDFs, you can build them using any number of tools (3rd party or built into Pervasive).


Mirtheil
Certified Pervasive Developer
Certified Pervasive Technician
Custom VB and Btrieve development.

http://www.mirtheil.com

 

[feeple]

I'm in the same boat you are. Presently, I'm using butil to export data into a flat file and have written a custom parser in Java to convert the bytes to something usable. Pretty tedious.

There were some ODBC drivers for your version of Btrieve as Mirtheil pointed out, haven't tried them as I don't have DDFs.

Couple of things:
1) I've had limited success with BTRIEVE::SAVE, freely downloadable from CPAN.org. Try it if you're familiar with Perl.

2) If you have no DDFs, sniff around your application's directories with grep to see if there are any config files that hold clues as to your data's layout. The reporting tool (IQ Software) used with the product I'm dealing with has a config file it uses to mine data from Btrieve. I was able to parse it and know what it knows (which wasn't everything, but was a lot).

3) I've had VERY limited success re-generating DDFs using Pervasive and other tools available on the net (i.e. classicsoftware). Even if the tools were more wieldy, one must still have a pretty good idea of what's in each file to begin with. To my knowledge, the tools don't guess the right column names for you and such. Perhaps a Pervasive Guru can help us both in this regard.

4) The first thing you'll read about converting your old data to the latest version of Pervasive is that DDFs are required. I suspect that had I had DDFs, I'd have already sent Pervasive some money for their workgroup version at the very least. In the absence of DDFs, it's been useless to me.

What I've learned so far:
Btrieve data, have you DDFs => E-ticket ride.
No DDFs => a long wait for a rough ride after which you toss your cookies.

Good luck!

Site:

http://www.feeple.com

Location: SF Bay Area

 

[grnelson]

If you need to create DDF files you can take a look at BtSearch32 at

http://www.nssdd.com.

It allows you to analyze the data in the file and create the DDF files. It does take some time but it is possible to do. There is no way to automatically build a set of DDF files so this uses a different method where you can view the resulting data in all the various Pervasive Btrieve data types and select the correct data type.



Gil