Moving Data out of Sybase 8 from Custom App

[Former Member]

Hello Sybase Community,

I work for the inbound team at SAP, and I recently had a conversation with a gentleman who is working on upgrading an old custom DB application for a client.  The DB is holding about 12 GB and it is running Sybase 8.0.3.5002.

He is looking for a tool that will allow him to upgrade/export the database, but the custom app doesn't allow for any exporting of the data; just read and enter.  They would like to move the data out of the old DB into whatever they choose to upgrade to.

We have tried using Sybase Central 16 to perform this process, but when he tries to connect to the DB, he gets the following error: 

Could not connect to the database.Unable to start specified database: 'C:\Users\Craig\Desktop\old.db' was created by a different version of the software

Any ideas on what might be a good approach to this situation?  Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thank you!

[former_member188493]

Do you have SQL Anywhere 8 installed? If so you can use the SQL Anywhere 8 utility dbisql to run SQL statements.

Do you have a userid and password for the database? If so you can use dbisql to connect to the database and run SELECT and OUTPUT TO FILE statements to extract individual tables to text files.

You can also use the SQL Anywhere 8 dbunload utility to extract all the tables to text files.

You can also use SQL Anywhere 16 dbunload to upgrade the database.

Before discussing these these techniques further, please answer the questions about what you have; in particular, a user id and password... some packaged products only allow database access via their programs, not via direct database connections.

[former_member182948]

Hi,

SA16 can connect ver.10 or later database.

So you need rebuild the database.

Please see the following manual.

"Rebuilding a version 9 or earlier database (Sybase Central)"

Regards,

Koichi

[former_member182948]

I should show more appropriate link.

Please see the following document.

"The rebuild process for version 9 and earlier databases"

Regards,

Koichi

[Former Member]

Chris,

As Chris Baker says, this is probably a SAP SQL Anywhere database... The version you quote, namely 8, alone would be an indication that this is not SAP ASE... However, the naming convention of file left on the desktop, e.g. old.db is a dead give away.

Post your question on the SAP SQL Anywhere forum.

Best of luck.

Regards,

Jean-Pierre

[c_baker]

You actually appear to be running SQLAnywhere 8.0.3, not ASE.

There is a separate community for that:

You should repost your question there, however, to answer part of the question, you cannot run some older versions of the SQLAnywhere database on a newer engine.  There have been points during the lifecycle of SQLAnywhere where it was decided not to support older versions of the database.  The database had to be upgraded through a couple of releases first.  As such, I think SQLAnywhere 16 may support v11, v12 and v16 databases only.

Someone will correct me, but I think v8 support was dropped in v10 or v11..

The other issue is that, depending on the application, the database could only run in a vendor-supplied 'authenticated' engine.  Only the vendor's application(s) could connect to and use the database.  This allowed the full capabilities of SQL Anywhere to be used, but only for that application.  3rd parties were not allowed to connect.

If your client can still access the database and has the utilities available, there is a tool 'dbxtract' that should be able to extract the DDL and data for him to import to a newer version of SQLAnywhere.  The DBA login will be required.

If the dbxtract tool is not available, but ODBC access is available (and the database is not authenticated and they have the DBA login) then tools such as PowerDesigner can extract the DDL, while other tools can get the data.

Chris

[former_member229434]

Hi Chris,

This SCN is for Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database server.
I think you want SCN for "SAP SQL Anywhere"

Please re-post on   http://scn.sap.com/community/sql-anywhere

Regards,

Michael

[former_member188958]

I've moved the post to the SQL Anywhere space.

-bret [Moderator]

[Former Member]

Thanks guys.