Answered READING PROGRESS DB

[Robert Perkins]

I am new to Progress and a customer sent me two Progress 9.1D databases to read and produce some reports. The first database is very simple four user tables with columns of type integer, date and characters. The second database is not so simple. I have seven user tables four of which are empty, two which both have less than 100 rows and then one large table with three columns, two integers and one column of type RAW. The customers application displays records out of this data in a Progress 4GL application. This is a customer call center application and from the application I can see the customer names and the reasons they called, the service personnel that handle the call, but all I see in the database is this one table with all this binary data. Is there anyway to read this data like the application without the application?

 

[RealHeavyDude]

Progress 9.1d is Stone Age software. As LOBs ( BLOB and CLOB respectively ) have been introduced into the product come OpenEdge 10 RAW was the only way to store binary data in the databse in roughly 32K chunks ( that is the limit for the size of one record ) back then. In order to extract and work with the data you must know:

1. What type of binary data is it ( a picture or some sort office document, etc. )
2. The split logic so that you can rebuild the whole binary object again.

All of these questions are most likely answered in the source code of your customer's application. I am afraid that, without knowing the answer to this two questions, you won't be able to do anything with the binary data. If you customer does not own the source code or a documentation that details on that you are pretty hosed - I guess.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[Robert Perkins]

Thank you.