Our community has bought the Village Shop from its previous owner, and
we find ourselves with an EPOS system ("Samstock v3") that is based on
Paradox tables via a copy of the Borland Database Engine. I need to
import data into Access or Paradox for selective deletion - we have
thousands of obsolete product lines listed and there is no automatic
method for deleting them.

The application itself seems happy enough to plod on with the databases
it uses - no visible error messages and (since I fixed an index
corruption a few months back), no obvious performance problems.

But I am having trouble importing or opening several of the files. I
have tried importing into Excel 2000, Access 2, Access 2000, - and
Alpha 5 v6 - all hit problems with several of the tables, eg: "External
table is not in the expected format", "Cannot define field more than
once", "Jet Database could not find the object named abc.db"

I have tried a "Paradox tables check and repair utility v 4.42"
(Pdxrbld.exe, which uses tutil32.dll) which reports errors when trying
to repair that table.

I have a copy of Paradox 5.0, and have tried opening the files with
that; errors on many files here too whether I open them as v4 or v5.
Table Repair on these tables results in single-field-per-record tables
which I am sure is not right.

Have I got seriously screwed up data tables (if so, any ideas on how to
fix them?) or are the repair/import utilities assuming the wrong
version of Paradox. Is there any way I can work out which version of
Paradox my files belong to?

John Geddes
England

John,

....just for starters...

Re Repair utilities: Chimneysweep is a highly recommended repair utility,
available at http://www.sundialservices.com/. The CEO visits here regularly.

Re Deleting obsolete data; you would need to watch out for
"Referential-Integrity" issues - eg, don't delete records from, say,
"master" tables, if these records are needed in validation / lookups from
other tables. Eg, "Products" that are already referenced in archived/old
sales transactions. If you're deleting only "transactions", or master
records that are DEFINITELY not referenced from any other table, I guess
that's ok.

Re Importing: you might try exporting from Paradox first, perhaps to dBase
or CSV, and then importing that file.

- Mike


<john (AT) starmarkassociates (DOT) co.uk> wrote

<john (AT) starmarkassociates (DOT) co.uk> wrote in message
you don't need to import in Access:

File / Open / pick a Paradox table

the first time you do that, Access will ask for the Office CD and install
it's native Paradox drivers..


maybe.. but it's also possible that you've got versions confused and/or
passwords omitted and/or confused..


--
Steven Green - Waldorf Maryland USA

Diamond Software Group
http://www.diamondsg.com/main.htm
Paradox Support & Sales - Corel CTech Paradox

Diamond Sports Gems
http://www.diamondsg.com/gemsmain.htm
Sports Memorabilia and Trading Cards

On 14 Feb 2006 10:41:46 -0800, john (AT) starmarkassociates (DOT) co.uk wrote:
Just in case you don't know, the current table version is 7. The current
Paradox version is 11, but it's little changed (and not for the better)
since v9. You can get copies of v9 from Steven.

Jim Hargan

john (AT) starmarkassociates (DOT) co.uk wrote:
Microsoft Access can "attach" to Paradox tables. But you may need to get
the "real" Paradox ODBC driver ... the one from InterSolv ... which I know
to be distributed with the Paradox (Word Perfect Office) product. At one
time, Access was using stuff based on some very old [Copia] code which was
never really accurate.


That's good. Really. You can keep the application doing what it does from
day to day, AND you can refer to its data with Access, AND you can import
the data into Access's own native MDB format.


All of the tables are probably fine. The problem is the Access driver...
see above.


Paradox for Windows version =five= is a 16-bit release. Go out to a store
and buy a copy of Word Perfect Office Professional. Install the Paradox
product and its ODBC drivers.


----
ChimneySweep(R): F-A-A-ST table repair at a click of the mouse!
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep

Which is the minimum version of WordPerfect Office Pro that would be OK
for this? Money is tight and buying v12 is very expensive - v8 is
available cheaply, but is that new enough?

John Geddes

<john (AT) starmarkassociates (DOT) co.uk> wrote in message

for your purposes, anything from 7/32 to present will do.. 9 or 10 would be
the smartest, for other reasons, long-term reasons.. I sell all versions on
my web site..


--
Steven Green - Waldorf Maryland USA

Diamond Software Group
http://www.diamondsg.com/main.htm
Paradox Support & Sales - Corel CTech Paradox

Diamond Sports Gems
http://www.diamondsg.com/gemsmain.htm
Sports Memorabilia and Trading Cards