View data within legacy binary database.

BrokenArrows

I have an old database which is made up of multiple .BIN files.

Is there a way that you know of that i can query or convert these files into something readable?

Hijpo

BrokenArrows wrote: »

I have an old database which is made up of multiple .BIN files.

Is there a way that you know of that i can query or convert these files into something readable?

Any good to you?

http://www.ehow.com/how_7730986_change-bin-files-database-files.html

Khannie

Worth checking out that link. I think there's a good chance it's some kind of proprietary format though. We were told to label any kind of cobol type database as a .bin file when I was in college.

There is a tool called "file" which may be of use to you. It comes with any linux / unix distribution. It's pretty good at guessing the contents of a specific file. Do you know what the name of the original database app was? If it's a proprietary database and you don't have access to the original binary, or some variant of it, you're probably screwed.

If you don't have access to a linux box, you're welcome to send me one of the .bin files and I'll see if it throws up anything.

Alun

There's a another utility called TrID (http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html) that does something similar and is available in a Windows version.

Alternatively you might want to just view the files with a hex viewer/editor to see if you can find any structure in the files. It may well be a very simple, fixed record /field length structure in which case it'd be relatively easy to write a small program to extract the data and write it out as, say, a csv file that could be imported into another database package relatively easily.