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Maintenance and Support - Binary Flat Files
The most compact form of data representation is the 'binary flat file', a storage
format used on early MS-DOS applications. These would have been used in business
applications written in QuickBasic, Microsoft PDS 7.x, Pascal, or C++. Common
characteristics include a 'header' record with a counter indicating the number
of data records, fixed length records, intermixtures of fixed length strings,
binary 16-bit and 32-bit integers, and single and double precision MBF floating point.
Our Extraction Analyzer program is used for making visual 'dumps' of these files.
Once a reasonable understanding of the data structure is developed, the program can
export the extracted data to SQL based relational databases, whether SQL Server, Oracle,
MySQL, or PostGreSQL.
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