Ok,

I've really got myself into a situation here. I have been selected to do a DB conversion from FilePro(not FileMaker pro) on SCO Unix to MySQL on SUSE 10. Now, it's incredibly easy to just "od -c key > blah", it gives me something that can be read, but with a huge database, editing each line by hand is extremely challenging and would take weeks. I have heared of some people who have done this conversion successfully with php, but no one will reply anywhere I post. If anyone has any tips or maybe even a script to handle this, please let me know. Also, i'm trying to do all this without actually installing the mess of filepro. Thanks in advance

J.W.

I've done a lot of data base conversions, and it always came down to dumping the original DB tables to text files, then using utilities from the new DB to populate tables. Very intensive, but not very difficult.

I may be that someone can provide you with a script to automate portions of the data transfer, but if it was me, I'd start "shoveling."

I know, i've been digging at it for a while. This is a sample of what i'm getting from od -c

~~
0000000 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0000020 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0000040
*
0000200 001
0000220 \0 032 \v \0 \0 Ô 022 Ê \0 ¢ 037 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0000240 \0 \0 \0 9 8 6 3 3 J
0000260 A C K B U R N E
0000300 Y
~~

etc etc...

Like I said this helps, but i'm not the best at grepping | regular expressions to get all of this into a comma-delimited file.
Now, all this is coming from the KEY file. I don't have the data and map files, but i'm sure it's needed.

J.W.

That's an impossible situation unless you know the data intimately. I know neither FilePro nor MySQL well enough to be much specific help, but you HAVE to have data dictionaries for the files. Is this an actively used database with reports and input applications. I assume FilePro has a "report generator" of some kind that you can just write "reports" which would include each field from a table; but you need the data dictionary to know exactly what fields are there.

I don't think that utilities like grep are going to be much help in sorting thru a proprietary database table. They have a vested interest in making it difficult to convert.

Are you going to also provide the user interface to add new data to the MySQL DB?

Good luck.

I don't know filepro but a quick google gave the following link.

I think the best option at this point is start hacking with php and the read-only file support provided with all of the key, data, map files.

If your suggesting new user interfaces for the existing system, no. I will have to modify the existing interaction, but other than that, no.

I've actually written an application in php and shell scripts that converts filepro data into mysql data using the map, key and data files only, no proprietary filepro code. I would be happy to assist you with this project. I have used it now on many filepro conversion projects. I'm hoping to get it to a point where I can offer it to the community. But right now it is still in "beta" format.