Got a (hopefully) interesting little question and problem for anyone who has experience with Btrieve/Pervasive
I've been given a set of files to 'examine', and been asked to extract a set of data from them for someone (who actually owns the data, so no IP issues or anything). Its a product database, containing a list of products, barcodes and prices, as well as numerous other bits of information. However, its in a format I have never played with before, and I don't really know how to extract the information.
Originally the data was accesses using a DOS based program, but unfortunately my friend managed to delete the program exe's by being a bit of a prat and deleting *.exe from the folder (everybody clap!), so now he cant read any of his data.
So anyway, i'm trying to extract the data from his tables. I've worked out that its a Btrieve database of some sort, as I have *.DDF files, *.BTR files and *.B files.
So I have a couple of questions:
Does anyone know how these files are related and what they are for? I think the DDF files are the indexes/descriptions, and the BTR files contain the actual table data, but I'm not sure what the B files are for.
How can I tell which version of Btrieve the files were created with?
Does anyone know how I can recover the data from the files? Freeware or a paid-for app
I've installed the latest Pervasive engine and can open the DDF files with the manager, but I can't see any of the data :S Just empty tables (or a file not found message depending on the table). Also the table I actually want to read doesnt get listed when I open the DDF ;/ I have also tried opening the BTR files with textedit, which gives me some of the data that I need, but not all of it..lots of the file is made up of ascii characters which probably mean its just not human readable data, more likely its encoded or something..I don't know enough about how btrieve works to guess though.
Any help, advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated, this may be a lost cause but I live in hope![]()


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