LONG BINARY DATA - how to read and/or access

[JRB-Bldr]

As far as MS Access goes, I am a novice but I have many years database application development in other PC databases.

As a "newbie" I am trying to find out how to extract MS Access "LONG BINARY DATA" data from a Database Table.

This data is within a table which is part of a old "off-the-shelf" Contact Manager application written in an older version of MS Access and which is no longer being supported. This particular data represents the Contact Manager "Notes".

I have a larger company-wide application project which needs to read the Contact Notes and I'd like to find a way to either directly access the information or to successfully export it in either a readable form or to another useable format such as another database, excel, etc.

Whenever I go in to my MS Access 2000 Browse screen to look at the data within the appropriate table, I just see the field marked as "Long Binary Data" and do not know:
1. How to read the data contained within (outside the application itself).
2. Where does this "Long Binary Data" reside (within the Database Container itself or elsewhere in another file)?
3. How to extract the data for inputing into something like an SQL Server database.

Your advice and/or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
JRB-Bldr

 

[willir]

jrbbldr

A pondering problem.

To address a couple of your issuess..

I suspect the "Comments" is a memo field. Access looks at this as a BLOB and not as actual typical database field, and as I understand it, the data for the memo field is not really stored as part of the table. (Pointers anyone?) Newer versions of Access are getting better. For example, older versions of Access would not allow you to search or index a memo field. Access 2000 and 2002 and 2003 will apparently allow you to index (and therefore search) the first 255 charcaters. (Probably creates a special index using the first part of the memo field, but still stores the memo outside of the table.

So this explains the dilema. I am not sure about the solution. I will do some research to see if anything turns up.

If you still have the "tools", you may want to try converting the database for each version of Access. "We" had problems for some data going from Access 97 to XP; a path with less conversion issues involved porting 97 -> 2000 -> 2002.

(And we had some Access 2 database that never did port properly, but I was not invovled, and am not sure what the details were.)

Richard

 

[JRB-Bldr]

Thanks for the reply.

I can do a Low Level file access and "raw" ASCII character extraction if required, but I would first have to know where the data 'lives'. And, I'd MUCH rather not do this approach if I can avoid it.

I look forward to anything more you should find or anyone else's comments/suggestions.

Thanks,
JRB-Bldr