Reading old external database through odbc = relationships gone?

[aurora1827]

Hi!


I am trying to read a very old relational database written in Omnis 7 from Access through an odbc driver.
Tables show up fine, but the relationships between tables are gone. This may be impossible to fix, but I'm grasping for straws here.
Anyone out there who can tell me anything about old databases and what I might try?

I've never tried to link up an entire database, maybe relationships never translate, but that seems stupid...
These tables have no useful keys, I think this database predates Access 1.0...(!)

This database is "live" and still in use, much because there's no way of getting the data out!

Regards,
Åsa

[ItsMe]

If the tables have no useful Keys, why are you concerned with their relationships? Whether or not referential integrity and constraints can be managed by the old database, I do not know. Why not proceed as if they are not managed by the BE?

[CJ_London]

I don't know anything about Omnis but if it is a relational db then by definition, there should be relationships. When you say relationships are gone - and I appreciate you say the tables have no useful keys - do you mean you cannot see a primary key in a parent table and a foreign key in a child table? Or do you mean the relationships window does not show relationships? If the latter and you can see primary/foreign keys then you can recreate them if required. I would be surprised if Access would do this for you.

The other possibility is you are not seeing the tables, but 'views' aka SQL Server which may exclude them.

Also take a look at these links

http://www.tigerlogic.com/tigerlogic...s/tnsq0003.jsp
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...omnis-database

One other thing to try is to update your ODBC driver - go to the tigerlogic website which seems to have a lot on Omnis

[aurora1827]

If the tables have no useful Keys, why are you concerned with their relationships? Whether or not referential integrity and constraints can be managed by the old database, I do not know. Why not proceed as if they are not managed by the BE?

Let me give an example:
Say I have two tables, one table with customer names and addresses, one table with orders.
In the Omnis database, these link up, so I can list which orders belong to which customer.
When reading the database in Access, I get a table of customers and a table of orders, but no link between them.

They don't have keys, but they have "connections", which are managed separately and are not fields in the tables.
They seem to be stored in the file structure somehow...

I'm looking into if Omnis SQL 1994 can join two tables. They should have invented joins in 1994...I hope...

[aurora1827]

Thanks for your suggestions. I have no keys, no nothing....
Basically, the tables come out without any way of recreating the links, which makes the data rather useless.
(Things like customers, orders, bills.... all garbled)

I think this database predates modern database standards.
Maybe if I'm lucky, Tigerlogic has manuals left from 1994 in a readable file format....hehe....probably not...=/

[ItsMe]

Sounds like you are trying to get a hold of some predefined queries/views that reside in the Omnis DB file. This links suggest there can be schema saved in the file that represents a saved query. Maybe there is a way you can use your Access front end to interrogate the Omnis' schemas via the ODBC connection.
http://www.studiotips.net/docs/tips_...asses/all.html