dBase

DBF (dBase, Visual FoxPro, Clipper, xBase, FoxBase)

dBase was one of the first database management systems. Visual FoxPro, Clipper, XBase and FoxBase all use dBase's DBF file format for their database files.

Database file format dBase uses (files with extension .DBF) is well documented, which allowed many 3rd party applications to read and write DBF files. Also, many programming languages/database systems rely on DBF format. xBase is a general term describing all programming languages deriving from original dBase (Ashton-Tate) language and database format. Visual FoxPro is Microsoft’s product, derived from FoxPro (developer by Fox Software back in 1984.) FoxPro was originally named FoxBASE. Clipper was originally a compiler for dBase III (created back in 1985), sold to Computer Associates and renamed as CA-Clipper in 1992. That’s quite a rich history of some very popular products.

We have written our own direct DBF reader and writer components, very efficient and fast, allowing us to both read and write files made by any application conforming to standard DBF structure. There are several versions of DBF format and we can handle all of them.


Similar to CSV files and Excel documents, DBF files are de-facto standard for data interchange. When we compare DBF and CSV formats, DBF has several advantages:

- DBF is a binary format, so less space is used than in textual CSV format

- DBF tables define column data types specifically, avoiding the need to scan the whole file to determine the optimal type

- There are separate memo files that store large textual data, allowing for long multiline text to be stored (most CSV parsers are confused by multiple lines of text in a single data record)

Full Convert supports dBase database directly.

dBase data types we support

Integral

autoincrement, integer

Decimal

currency, double, float, numeric

Text

char, text

Binary

binary, varbinary

Date/Time

date, datetime, timestamp

Large objects

blob, text

Other

logical

Export dBase database

It may make sense to migrate your data away from dBase. You may want to do it permanently or just need to share your tables with a collague in a different format.

We will copy all your tables with their data and apply indexing and relationships exactly as they are in your current dBase database. In a nutshell, you get exactly the same database in another database engine. Each time you run the migration, we will copy all the tables again. Of course, we have a built-in scheduler, so you can run this overnight and have a fresh database copy in the morning.

Take a look at the quick tutorials below to see how it's done.