April 2, 2004 at 11:09 am
I have a series of flat files sent over from a VAX that I need to import into sqlserver. These are raw VAX RMS files (.dbs) There are control char, some binary stuff etc.. in these files. The VAX cannot turn them into a nice format for import because the processing of the conversion on the VAX takes longer than the refresh window we need for import. Does anyone know of a way to import these files? Has anyone used any conversion tools that have worked?
SqlServer 2000
Thanks in advance
April 2, 2004 at 1:04 pm
Options:
(1) Invest in an ODBC driver for RMS.
(2) If you have Oracle installed try using the Gateways product so that your RMS files are viewable within your Oracle db, then you can pull the data out through the Oracle db.
(3) If you have Datatrieve, convert those files to all ASCII and have SQL Server read the ASCII files in place using pathworks/Advanced-Server or FTP the files to an area where SQL Server can see them.
An old VMS-er,
Jeff
April 2, 2004 at 1:21 pm
Jeff,
Thanks for the information. I quess I should have included some additional information, sorry. We will have no direct access to the VAX and they are strictly ftping the raw .dbs files to us. We will have nothing but the files to work with. Does anyone know how one might convert the files to ASCII?
Thanks,
Mike
November 21, 2017 at 8:09 am
I know this is a really old thread but I have a similar challenge.
Using 'The DEC DBMS Unload Utility' we can dump a number of .dat files from our old (very old!) VAX. I'm looking for a way to get at the data in those .dat files - could be into Oracle, SqlServer, CSV or whatever.
RMS is a database-like binaryformat.
We're a stage further than Mikes problem of needing to deal with the .dbs files but I'm not getting far with the RMS files.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Chris
December 6, 2017 at 11:39 am
chris.gaskell - Tuesday, November 21, 2017 8:09 AMI know this is a really old thread but I have a similar challenge.Using 'The DEC DBMS Unload Utility' we can dump a number of .dat files from our old (very old!) VAX. I'm looking for a way to get at the data in those .dat files - could be into Oracle, SqlServer, CSV or whatever.
RMS is a database-like binaryformat.
We're a stage further than Mikes problem of needing to deal with the .dbs files but I'm not getting far with the RMS files.Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Chris
I had much better success with dbms files with datatrieve. dbms is more of a "networking" database, and using datatrieve helped propogate key candidates to be used as foreign keys in the destination. The vms dump utility might not be as well suited here. We routinely dumped dbms data into oracle, but we used datatrieve so that we could make sure that member records had the key of the owner record because while dbms links its records using a sort of linked list, when using this linked list, you had an implicit relationship which must be made explicit in the destination relational database, that's why we would propogate the key from the set "owner" to each extracted set "members" (if I remember the terminology correctly LOL)
edit: the unload routine will indeed move data so you can use the key in the "owner" record in the "member" records for each set so you can use that in your relational database.
another concern to keep in mind is that numerical data might remain in DEC's data type format in the rms files, we used datatrieve to get around that by simply formatting numbers into text.
August 1, 2018 at 5:38 am
CONNX for RMS http://www.connx-net.com/rms.htm will enable you to do this.
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