Hello All,

Being new, I hope not offend anyone with this first post.

I need some help extracting the schema and table contents

for an old application written under AREV 2.1. The company

that wrote the application has been out of business for a while,

and I have just recently inherited the application as the

new DBA.

What I would like to do is to be able to programmatically

extract the data (i.e., export) from the .LK & .OV files so

I can eventually load it into another database.

The application is very old, and the company I work for has

decided to purchase another system off the shelf. So, I am

tasked with figuring out the Data Dictionary for this system

and then for exporting the relevant data.

Are there any utilites out there to perform this Data Dictionary

discovery and exporting for this version of AREV?

If not, are there a file "structure" specifications that I can

follow to write my own export utility? (Yes, I'm also a

software engineer.)

Any help would be most appreciated!

Regards,

Bob Ingraham

How many files are involved?. The major problem you will run into when converting AREV data to other data bases is the treatment of the AREV multivalued data fields.

We have a system that exports AREV data to a tab delimited ASCII file. The system includes field delimiter and multivalue field export options. The system is used by clients to export data to EXCEL for example as the system exports the field IDS as the first record of the file.

If I can be of help let me know by emailing me at [email protected]

Mark

Let me noIf you can

I market software for exporting data from all versions of Revelation. It will detect multivalues and subvalues and split them appropriately into separate records. It will also 'flatten' specified multivalue fields into separate fields - this is useful for fields containing data such as addresses. Output can either be in fixed format, comma delimited (csv) or output with user specified field and record delimiters.

You do not need to know any file names, field names or data structures to run this software. It requires no knowledge of Revelation as the manual will outline what little you need to know to run the single Revelation EXPORTR program.

EXPORTR will detect all attached data files and 'real' fields. It will then apply any existing field conversions. Dates are converted from the Revelation date which is a count of days to DD MMM YYYY format (or any other preferred format). Data is output to standard .csv format suitable for input to most applications including MS Excel and MS Access.

We also market a service to build an MS Access database from the output data formats. Suitable table names are created (ie. CUSTOMER.ADDRESSES becomes tblCustomerAddresses) and field names (INVOICE_DATE becomes InvoiceDate). Appropriate datatypes are applied and field descriptions from Revelation are carried through.

We can supply a program to then validate/load and reload the .csv format data to this MS Access database as many times as required - this will work regardless of table name, field name or datatype changes made to the MS Access database.

For more detailed information please visit the following web site:

www.ts.co.nz/~finsol/scan.htm or contact me on [email protected] for the EXPORTR manual and an unregistered version of the software.

The following sequence will print a dictionary (schema) to an ASCII file named temp in the AREV directory. Such dumps are easily parsed and/or hand edited.

In addition to considering the systems already offered for sale, you may also need to be concerned with fields treated as multivalued when no so defined by the dictionary and may want to know about fields that are defined as multivalued but which have only single values. You will also want to know about fields that are used and not defined in the dictionary and fields that are defined and not used.

If your problem concerns specific HRIS systems, you might want to say so as there is considerable expertise with those floating around.

PDISK TEMP

LISTDICT filename

PDISK PRN

Bob,

Can you provide (without divulging all kinds of secrets) what the type of application from which you are trying to get data (as in accounting system, inventory system, HR system, etc). There is a wealth of knowlege out here in Rev-land that may be familiar with your type of application, if not the application itself (Arev and/or Pick are close-knit communities). I do data conversions (from, to and between Pick and Pick-like systems) for a good part of my regular business. Feel free take a look at my website should you wish further information. I would be happy to assist you should you needs so require.

Regards,

Eric Drews

Drews Enterprises

www.drews-ent.com

There was a third-party tool which I can't remember the name of that supposedly does a lot of this stuff for you. Supposedly would create the SQL scripts so you create the tables in SQL. We had an evaluation copy but couldn't get it to work. From what I understand the current version works as advertised.

Do some searching on this board.

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