Friday, December 31, 2010

Exporting Data from TopSpeed Data bases

Ugh, TopSpeed is a proprietary DB that has very limited tools that can access it. If you want to use it in an ODBC setup, you have to buy a $250 driver package! But once you do that it is still not an easy solution to get access to the data.

The easiest way I found to programatically access the data is to use MS access to pull the tps files as an external data source and then use .Net to connect to that access db. I also build a data mapper that will read the tps db, display sample data, and give you a list of "destination" fields from a text file.

I used this method to pull data from a Time Matters db and pump it into an Outlook / Exchange shared folder. The nice thing about doing it this way is I was able to map the user defined fields I wanted, and define the custom form for outlook for the client.

I can't share the tps driver, 'cause those pesky things call licenses and all, but I can definitely help someone out with pumping data if they need.
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