Figuring out an old "dos style" database table

[MarrowZero]

It's unlikely to be anything to do with Delphi - DOS era would be Borland Pascal, Assembler, QuickBasic etc. Delphi is Windows era. I guess your ID program has made a bad guess.

Arh, maybe its my mistake to title this as "and old dos style" as I was thinking more about the data files than the application. You can see from the screenshots the app is Windows based, so sorry if I was misleading in this regard. This is all a bit before my time, hence the call for help

I have taken the orignal appication and run it throuogh (https://github.com/crypto2011/IDR) and it does seem to recongise it as 'Delphi 5'

 

[agraham]

Yes, I had assumed you were talking about a DOS program.

 

[Sandman]

Yep, words matter.

 

[Daestrum]

This might help you get started decoding it

Sub Process_Globals
    Dim r As RandomAccessFile
    Dim buff(1024) As Byte
End Sub

Sub AppStart (Args() As String)
    r.Initialize2("d:/olddbfiles","S_RESO.dat",True,True) ' Values are little endian
    r.ReadBytes(buff,0,1000,0)
    Dim recLen As Int = r.ReadShort(0xc)
    Log("Record length = " & recLen & " bytes")
    For pos = 1 To 20 ' first 20 records
    r.ReadBytes(buff,0,recLen,4+(recLen*pos))
        Dim descLen As Byte = buff(30) ' length of description
        Log(BytesToString(buff,0x1f,descLen,"US-ASCII"))
    Next
    r.Close
End Sub

 

[MarrowZero]

This might help you get started decoding it

It certainly puts my thoughts in a new direction, thankyou so much. ?

 

[rabbitBUSH]

certainly puts my thoughts in a new direction, thankyou so much.

I just seen this thread now. A friend [ Still] Uses Delphi 5 a lot, he says:

D5 had the brilliant and fast BDE that used dBase table files, now hard to install and manage on win10.

I moved all our stuff to SQLite, found a set of headers and interface routines on the web somewhere, tweaked it a little here and there. Works well.

Says he has a reader script to convert if you're still interested - and assuming your files are as github says - Delphi5.

 

[MarrowZero]

Says he has a reader script to convert if you're still interested - and assuming your files are as github says - Delphi5.

In post#1 I uploaded some sample files - I wonder if your friend would be interested to download these and see if they can indeed be read?

Thanks for taking an interest in this thread.

 

[rabbitBUSH]

In post#1 I uploaded some sample files - I wonder if your friend would be interested to download these and see if they can indeed be read?

Thanks for taking an interest in this thread.

I have the script and the source URL. I will check later on and let you know through PM.

You can find Delphi 7 on the net and download as well - which resolves some D5 issues - if you need it.

 

[pliroforikos]

Before 26 years i was working for a company where they were writting code to cobol. My responsibility was to transfer some of those programs to MSAccess 2.0 . Many files like them was in the program directories.
Dat: data files
Ndx: index files

2. there was an other database named paradox from corel or borland but i dont remember much about it.
3. Clipper had files like them, and dbf files too.

 

[Magma]

..COBOL, qbasic, basic, gwbasic, pascal...

the file record will be a Type (mixed with strings, integer, double, currency, long, char)... specifi fields... with specific length per record... idx just used for faster search... so need personal work to achieve extract the fields/records... and ofcourse the "person" will do the job must know the result of a record... and better at least 2-3 records at rows..

 

[MrKim]

Indeed I have looked for export functions, sadly there is nothing useful. Even printing and OCR might not be good as those printed reports are for the summary of infomation, not the table data.

If you have MS Access available I would try using their import functions - you might even want to go with an old version if you can get it. Access is pretty damn good at sorting out various file types. Although I don't have as much experience with it Excel is good at it as well. If you can get the data into an access table or excel spreadsheet then you can export it in a manageable form.

 

[Alex_197]

If I not late to the party I'd like to add my 2 cents - try MS Visual Foxpro

 

[tchart]

Not sure if you read this thread;

[RESOLVED] How to Read DAT Files-VBForums

Hi Guys, We are in the process of upgrading a clients software. I'm not sure what database their existing app uses but in the db folder there are DAT and IDX files. I need to find a way of reading those files so I can import the data across to the new database. Can someone please advise me...

www.vbforums.com

They ended up using an app called DBISAM

Might be worth spending €20 to see if it works.

 

[tchart]

This is the app the thread refers to. There is a trial version.

Direct and fast dbisam-file processing in DBISAM viewer