Author Topic: Conversion to tpdb8s  (Read 3897 times)

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mschnell

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Conversion to tpdb8s
« on: 2015-07-26 16:43:48 »
With TP10, I tried to convert a tpdb8 database to tpdb8s format.

As TP10 does not seem to provide a dedicated means for this, I just created a new tpdb8s, exported the content of the tpdb8 to a txt and then tried to import the txt to the new database.

Here I get nothing but an  error message "Obtaining mounted Volume Information" -> "Format error in file".

This seems like a horrible bug making TP10 unusable for me even before trying any of it's features.

-Michael

Daan van Rooijen

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Conversion to tpdb8s
« Reply #1 on: 2015-07-26 18:39:00 »
> This seems like a horrible bug making TP10 unusable for me even before trying any of it's features.

If your complaint is that export/import is far from perfect, that's correct. But that has little to do with v10, because export/import in older versions isn't any better.

If your database works with v8 or v9, you can simply continue to use it in v10.

In your case, the problem seems to be that your TD4 has reached the 2GB size limit, so converting to TPDB8 wouldn't make much sense because it has the same limit. Does it contain keywords or annotations that can't be re-built from the image files? Or gallery data, or thumbnails from offline media? If not, starting from scratch with a TPDB8S might be the best solution, or split the database in two if that's a workable option.

I haven't fiddled with export/import in a long time, but one major problem that I recall was that annotations can contain linebreaks and commas. This messes up the CSV (comma separated values) format of the export/import text files (where a linebreak represents the beginning of a new record and a comma denotes the beginning of a new field). I once had to convert a customer's database that required a lot of tidying up in a text editor before it could be successfully imported.
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mschnell

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Conversion to tpdb8s
« Reply #2 on: 2015-07-26 19:03:09 »
>If your complaint is that export/import is far from perfect, that's correct. But that has little to do with v10, because export/import in older versions isn't any better.

It seems that with v10 some (most) of the worst persistent problems are addressed, so I now consider converting from TP7, while with 8 and 9 this did not seem to make sense.


>If your database works with v8 or v9, you can simply continue to use it in v10.
>In your case, the problem seems to be that your TD4 has reached the 2GB size limit, so converting to TPDB8 wouldn't make much sense because it has the same limit.

I already did tests with v8 and v9 after importing the td4. Importing the td4 to v10 worked easily, but the tdp8 got rather close to the 2 Gig limit. So converting to tpd8s seems necessary.


>Does it contain keywords or annotations that can't be re-built from the image files? Or gallery data, or thumbnails from offline media?


Yes lots of those. They are absolutely necessary for the workflow - and in fact the cause why not staying with TP is not a decent option.


>I haven't fiddled with export/import in a long time, but one major problem that I recall was that annotations can contain linebreaks and commas. This messes up the CSV (comma separated values) format of the export/import text files (where a linebreak represents the beginning of a new record and a comma denotes the beginning of a new field). I once had to convert a customer's database that required a lot of tidying up in a text editor before it could be successfully imported.

In fact I once for a test converted the TP7 database to a Client-server database (Postgres). With some help from some friendly people here this did work nicely by exporting / importing.

I understand that converting to SqLite is very similar to converting to a Client/server database.

As I am a programmer myself, I suppose I could create a program that tweaks the text file as appropriate. But as there is no decent error message that shows what in the text file the import function does not like, there seems not to be a chance trying.

I could try to find stray linebreaks but will that really help ?

-Michael

Daan van Rooijen

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« Reply #3 on: 2015-07-26 20:53:02 »
Hi Michael,

As a programmer, maybe you can use [link=https://code.google.com/p/mdb-sqlite/]THIS[/link] Java-based tool to convert the TPDB8 file to SQlite3. The page mentions 'SQLite' but [link=http://goobbe.com/questions/2940956/type-4-jdbc-driver-for-ms-access-mdb-database]elsewhere[/link], someone said "I've used jackcess to read the tables from an MDB and convert the database to sqlite3" so I guess SQLite3 is supported too.

> In fact I once for a test converted the TP7 database to a Client-server database (Postgres). With some help from some friendly people here this did work nicely by exporting / importing.

Hm.. that suggests that there are no stray commas or linebreaks in the data.

> I could try to find stray linebreaks but will that really help ?

Maybe you should start by exporting just a few records, and then seeing if the resulting (small) text file can be imported without problems. I'd start with a few simple records, and if that works, try a few that have keywords, annotations and are members of galleries. If that also works, then a larger file should work as well, and I guess any errors that would pop up would be due to stray commas and linebreaks (and maybe quotation marks).

An easier way to find formatting errors is by converting the CSV data to fixed field text. With that, all fields should be neatly organized in columns and all lines should be (nearly) equally long. That makes it easy to spot broken records (too long or short), and if you sort on colums (with a good text editor, I like Boxer), you can locate data that appears in the wrong columns.
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mschnell

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« Reply #4 on: 2015-07-27 00:58:46 »
>Maybe you should start by exporting just a few records, and then seeing if the resulting (small) text file can be imported without problems.

Thanks.

I'll do this later this week.

-Michael