Hi all; I just started working with Talend and I'm very excited about what it may allow me to do.
I have inherited a somewhat awkward data environment that I'm slowly working to improve. We are bridging between an old system that was built in FoxPro (pre-Visual Foxpro...) and stores tables as individual .dbf files; and a newer system that uses MySQL. There is a very fragile connector now that was built in Visual Basic that synchronizes the two databases.
I envision using Talend to replace that connector so that I have a) a more reliable sync process and b) more flexibility to make schema changes to the MySQL database.
My question is this; can I open those DBF files directly in Talend? Obviously the (ancient) version of FoxPro we run doesn't have ODBC drivers... I've searched Google and on this forum and haven't found much to confirm or deny- there is a reference to a module in one posting but it's 2 years old and it's not clear to me whether it actually did what I need.
Thanks!
Brian, You can create an ODBC connection to a .dbf file the same way as you would do with an access file.
From : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/cpodbcdbase1.aspx Start -> Administrative Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC) -> User-DSN-> Add I work with a ODBC - Driver for dBase 5.0. At microsoft.com you can download the ODBC-Jet Driver. You have to create a DSN with the driver Microsoft dBase Driver (*.dbf), with the name test_dbase and with the right path to the file. Without creating the DSN, the application won't find the dBase file!
Hi brian,
Are you using Foxpro 2.6? The ODBC drivers that shipped with the older VFP versions should work. You can download them from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx I use newer VFP versions (6,8 and 9) heavily and have struggled with getting TOS to work with newer formats, especially since MS started pushing OLE-DB years ago. If you search on FoxPro you'll see some of my posts and I added a feature request for increased connectivity.
There is also a user contributed tFileInputXbase.zip component in the Ecosystem that you might want to try.
http://www.talendforge.org/ext/index.php?page=12 Again, not all the features of grabbing the schema and metadata via the TOS UI, but you might be able to pull the data.
- Brian
As a "last resort," if the connection is a one-way (from FoxPro -> MySQL) you could always export to a delimited text file from FoxPro and then load it into MySQL, Certainly the "long way" around the problem, but it would work.
