Hello Everyone,

I am posting this here because this seems to be where all of the database questions get asked. We purchased a new database system at work last October, ditching the old system because of a lack of support from the vendor. This is a retail Point of Sale and Backoffice database system. I am not sure what system the new one runs on, but the system we replaced was a Firebird data base.

The reason I am posting is because we are now in need of the information contained in the old database which was not completely imported into the new system. Unfortunately, we parted company with the old vendor under extremely hostile conditions, and they are not a source of help for this problem, nor are the new vendors.

Basically the problem is this: The database in on a Windows XP system and I found a copy of SQL Manager Lite 2008 on the system, which after quite a bit of studying, I figured out how to extract the database into a removable file. I have this file (178MB) on a USB stick in a file called Backoffice.fbd.

My studying suggests to me that I can get into this database with MySQL. I have never used this and have no clue how to do this. All I want to be able to do get into the database and create tab deliminated spreadsheet files for each of the database sections (Customers, Repairs, Sales History, stock files, etc.)

Is it possible to do this with Ubuntu and MySQL and if so, can an expert suggest one or two things to get me started. While a guided tutorial would be nice because I am not an expert, I am willing to learn on my own if someone could point me in the right direction.

Any thoughts or comments are appreciated in advance.

Bob

I'm not sure I can help you, however having said that you might post some of the raw data from your Backoffice.fbd file. That might give us an idea of the structure of the data and somebody might be more able to help you then.

Regards,

Fordeck

How did you create the fbd file?

I am not familiar with SQL Manager but I expect it to have tools to create queries and export the data to most common formats i.e. csv. If you export the table as SQL insert statements you should be able to import it into mysql.

I have not played with Firebird but you could also install the server on linux and be able to access the database file as is.

Thank you for your replies. Since posting, further investigation suggested just that, installing Firebird. I was successful in connecting to this file, but after doing so found that I had only extracted the database structure files, not the data itself. It showed me the table names and structure, but there was no data to be found. I guess I should have realized that when the file I extracted was only 178MB (this database encompasses five years worth of activity in the store.) I recently had to copy the new systems database to a new machine and the file was 24GB.

But, thanks to your help I believe I can find a way to import the data into this file once I find it on the old system.

Thanks again for your help.

Bob