We recently had a customer who had an old 19xx Delphi setup. We can no idea what DB, MB, PX, XG, YG meant. However, we knew that there was data in there. If you are looking at this blog for information, you probably ran into the same problem we had searching everywhere and finding nothing.
DILEMMA
Delphi 5 was used with paradox data files to store information. Delphi 5 is no longer supported by modern operating systems and it can be hard to find. We needed to get the information out of the data files and into our mysql database so we could build a new application.
OPTIONS
There are a few applicaitons out there that want you to pay. As with other crazy conversions we do here, we always want to know why we need to pay. If its complex then fine but this seems terribly simple.
Unfortunately, its not simple and your solutions are limited to the following
- -Finding a copy of delphi and using it to export your data
- -Using applications that advertises conversion capabilities like paradox viewer (trial, buy)
- -Use a free applicaiton like pxtools. However this is linux only and comand line driven
WEAKNESSES
The free software does not handle weird field declarations well. The paid software does not handle data types correctly at all.
SOLUTION
This write up addresses using choice 2 and 3 to get the needed solution. For whatever reason, pxtools is not efficient with their sql dump, producing perfect data but had declarations. The application paradox view in trial form only produces the first 100 records. Well for those of your desperate enough to find this article about such an old technology, your eyes are probably lighting up.
Its not that time intensive and you have a solution to get all of the information, perfect table declarations and all of the data.We simply used both tools to export the data then pieced the declarations in where needed.
CONCLUSION
For those of you that need to do this quite often or are not technically inclined, this might be way too much work and a free advertisement for an application. For the others, you are welcome, convert that data for free.