Btrieve, DDF, DAT, I have all the files but don't know how to connect to the pervasive database [closed]

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It came with Lytec Chiropractic 2001. A client of mine needs to recover his patient records but lost his activation key in a system crash. I have no experience with this type of database, and there are very limited resources online for extracting these DBs to workable sql or similar. Does anyone know how to do this? I have tried pervasive sql v9 but really have no clue what to do.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Short answer, if you have any Pervasive engine that supports ODBC, you can export the records. That doesn't mean they'll be useful just that they'll be exported.
To export the tables, you need to create a Database Name pointing at the data files, then create an ODBC DSN pointing to the Database Name, then use an ODBC tool to export the tables to a suitable format. Pervasive / Actian has a pretty good write up on how to create the Database Name and ODBC DSN in their docs. The documentation is for v11 but applies for v9 and v10 as well. As far as exporting the tables, you can from the Pervasive Control Center export to CSV by right clicking the table and selecting Export Data. You can also use other third party tools to export the data.

If your PSQL v9 license isn't active, I would suggest downloading the v11 trial and installing it. This will give you 30 days to use the engine to export your data. If you need it after that, you can purchase a license. The Lytec application should work just fine with the v11 engine although I haven't tried it myself.