Transferring data from old data base to Access

John O' Meara

Hi,
I have a friend who has a friend who has a data base of 20000+ enteries. This data base was constructed using something called D base nearly twenty years ago. Now, they want to know is it possible to transfer the 20000 odd enteries to a modern data base without having to type in the enteries individually to the new database like Access.
(1) What is D base, does anyone in this forum know?
(2) Is it possible software wise to copy the D base enteries to Access or other new data base and if so how?
Thanks for helping.

turbo

Google is your friend. There are lots of conversion programs out there. The cost should be under $500.

mgb_phys

If the data is reasonably flat (ie not a complex set of linked tables) then just dumping the dbase format to comma separated fields (CSV) then importing it into access would be easy.

IIRC Excel will read DbaseIII files into a spreadsheet directly.

turbo

Ashton Tate dBase was a wonderful program, and it was pretty much reverse-engineered as FoxBase, which also included a nice compiler. MS bought FoxBase before releasing the perversion that is Access, and they should have provided free conversion tools. Having written application programs for dBase and FoxBase for years, I was quite disappointed with Access when I ended up having to build some very simple applications (it would have been far simpler in dBase or FoxBase) for a customer.