[RndTbl] Business Basic BBx Data Extraction

[Michael Sierks]

Awesome, thanks for all the information guys.

much appreciated

On 06/21/12 02:58, Adam Thompson wrote:
> Oh, FYI... The reason I thought I could do a BBx app migration was 
> that I used to be a BBx programmer. Fat lot of good it did me.
> -Adam
>
> Adam Thompson <athompso at athompso.net> wrote:
>
> You haven't been led astray - flat file goes not necessarily mean text 
> or human-readable. The data is in an ISAM format, and you will either 
> need to locate and purchase one of the data extraction tools that used 
> to be on the market, or write an extraction routine yourself in BBx.
> There is a very small amount of information out there about their file 
> format, if you want to try writing a BBx decoding library from scratch.
> It might be much easier to set up a dummy printer and print out each 
> patient's complete file - there's likely a print routine in the 
> software. Then take the output and parse it with your favourite 
> programming language. If you get fancy with a printcap definition, you 
> might find ways of making the parsing easier. This still might require 
> a temp sitting at a terminal for several days printing one file at a time.
> I've done one AIX to Linux conversion of a BBx app... I'm never doing 
> that again except on a time-and-materials basis, for about $500/hr 
> with no estimates up front.
> BBx is a decent programming language (especially for its time) but 
> they have (or had, it's been a few years) absolutely no idea how to 
> package their software, or how to build it in a portable manner. I 
> remember having to exclude libc from updates because the interpreter 
> would break on anything except the EXACT version they had compiled 
> against.
> Which, fyi, means any system running a BBx app probably has multiple 
> exploitable bugs that have long since been patched.
> Have fun,
> -Adam
>
>
> Michael Sierks <msierks at gwn.ca> wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> I have an issue with some software that is well before my time and was 
> hoping someone from the muug group would be of assistance. I have been 
> tasked with extracting data from the following program.
>
> Assyst Practice Managment (GENIE) Software
> V8.8.6 an Emergis Inc. Product(STX.EME)
>
> This program itself is running on an old AIX 5.1 server and has been 
> written in BBx Pro5, a language I didn't even know existed. This 
> language appears to be an extension of Basic and is know as Business 
> Basic. Written by this company.
>
> http://www.basis.com/.
>
> Now the trouble is this program has no built in way of 
> dumping/extracting the data. It isn't using Pro/5's built in data 
> storage engine so I cannot simply use ODBC to pull the data out. We 
> have been informed it is storing all its data in a flat file. And the 
> best way to retrieve the data is by reading backups from the tape 
> drive, which we have done so. The data files retrieved mostly end in 
> the ".REC" and ".SUB" file extensions and appear to contain some 
> patient info. But the largest file that seems to contain most data 
> begins with the text "<<bbx>>" and is definetely not stored as flatfile.
>
> Does anyone have experience with this BBx language or does anybody 
> have any ideas for extracting the data ? I ask because the company 
> that has written this practice management software has no interest in 
> assisting with exporting the data. Any suggestions are appreciated.
>
>
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-- 
Michael Sierks
Software Developer

Global Office Software
globalofficesoftware.com
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