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Moving a Paradox application to PostgreSQL

I have a client that has an existing Paradox database. This database is used to keep track of various aspects of their customers, and is based on a database system I originally wrote on top of Notebook, so I’m afraid I have to take credit for all of the design flaws present in the application. This system was a single user Paradox database, with the client portion of Paradox installed on every computer and the working directory set to a shared drive location. It wasn’t a large system; the biggest table had about 10k records.

This system had worked for them for years, but recently they’d decided they needed a bit more insight into their customer base. Expanding the role of this database was going to allow them to do that, but the current setup was flawed. Paradox (version 10) often crashed, and only one user could be in at a time. I took a look at the system and decided that moving to a real client server database would be a good move. This would also allow them to move to a different client if they ever decided to get Access installed, or possibly a local web server. This document attempts to detail the issues I ran into and the steps I followed to enable a legacy Paradox application to communicate with a modern RDBMS.

I chose PostgreSQL as the DBMS for the back end. I wasn’t aware at the time that MySQL was recently freed for commercial use, but I still would have chosen PostgreSQL because of the larger feature set. The client had a Windows 2000 server; we discussed considered installing a Linux box in addition, but the new hardware costs and increased maintenance risk led me to install PostgreSQL on the Windows 2000 server. With Cygwin‘s installer, it was an easy task. I followed the documentation to get the database up and running after Cygwin installed it. They even have directions for installing the database as a Windows service (it’s in the documentation with the install), but since this was going to be a low use installation, I skipped that step.

After PostgreSQL was up and running, I had to make sure that the clients could access it. This consisted of three steps:

1. Make sure that clients on the network could access the database. I had to edit the pg_hba.conf file and start PostgreSQL with the -i switch. The client’s computers are all behind a firewall, so I set up the database to accept any connections from that local network without a password.

2. Install the PostgreSQL ODBC driver and create a system ODBC DSN (link is for creating an Access db, but it’s a similar process) for the new database on each computer.

3. Creating an alias in Paradox that pointed to the ODBC DSN.

Once these steps are done, I was able to query a test table that I had created in the PostgreSQL database. One thing that I learned quickly was that two different computers could indeed access PostgreSQL via the Paradox front end. However, in order to see each others changes to the database, I had to hit cntrl-F3, which refreshed from the server.

The next step was to move the data over. There are several useful articles about moving databases from other RDBMS to PostgreSQL here, but I used pxtools to output the data to plain text files. I then spent several days cleansing the data, using vi. I:

1. Exported table names were in mixed case; I converted them to lower case. PG handles mixed case, but only with ” around the table names, I believe.
2. Tried to deal with a complication from the database structure. I had designed it with two major tables, which shared a primary key. The client had been editing the primary key, and this created a new row in the database for one of the tables, but not the other. In the end, matching these up became too difficult, and the old data (older than a couple of years) was just written off.
3. Removed some of the unused columns in the database.
4. Added constraints (mostly not null) and foreign key relationships to the tables. While these had existed in the previous application, they weren’t captured in the export.

Then I changed the data access forms to point to the new database. The first thing I did was copy each of the data access forms, so that the original forms would still work with the original database. Most of the forms were very simple to port—they were just lookup tables. I found the automatic form generator to be very helpful here, as I added a few new lookup tables and this quickly generated the needed update/insert forms.

However, I did have one customized form that caused problems. It did inserts into three different tables. After the database rationalization, it only inserted into two, but that was still an issue. Paradox needed a value for the insert into each table (one because it was a primary key, the other because it was a foreign key). I couldn’t figure out how to have Paradox send the key to the both inserts without writing custom code. So, that’s what I did. I added code to insert first into the table for which the value was a primary key, and later to insert the value into the table for which it was a foreign key. It wasn’t a pretty solution, and I think the correct answer was to combine the two tables, but that wasn’t an option due to time and money constraints. I also made heavy use of the self.dataSource technique to keep lists limited to known values.

After moving the forms over, I had to move one or two queries over (mostly query by examples, qbes, which generated useful tables), but that was relatively straight forward; this was a helpful article regarding setting up some more complicated qbes. Also, I found a few good resources here and here.

I also updated a few documents that referenced the old system, and tried to put instructions for using the new system onto the forms that users would use to enter data. I moved the original database to a different directory on the shared drive, and had the client start using the new one. After a bit of adjusting to small user interface issues, as well as the idea that more than one user could use the database, the client was happy with the results.