importing revelation data into access

[Dave Mainland]

Has anyone ever imported data from a Revelation non-
relational database into access and made any sense of it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Albert D. Kallal]

You have to de-normalize the data.

While you may have a classing invoice list:


id: 237
Name:Albert Company: Macdonalds


Qty price Description
1 $3.35 Big Mac
2 $.99 coke


In a Multivalue database, the above is ONE record. The qty fields, and the
Price fields are able to have many values. The fields "id" and Name etc have
ONE value. In theory this really is a classic one to many in a relational
database. So, the above would be two table in a sql system.

However, there are commands in arev that lets you flatten, or expand the
above data into a traditional 2 file database (or at least you can view the
data logically that way despite the physical aspect that the above is only
on record). So, for example, the above table could be flattened by using:

SORT tblCustomer ID QTY PRICE Description BY-EXP QTY



The resulting data will be a flat table like:

ID Qty price Description
237 1 $3.35 Big Mac
237 2 $.99 coke


If you want read a nice paper on converting from a MV system to ms-access,
you can read my following paper on how to approach the conversion. The
following is written about Pick, but Revelation is Pick licensee, and is a
compatible system.

Conversion of a MVApplication to Ms-access
By Albert D. Kallal
Friday, April 06, 2001

http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn/Articles/fog0000000003.html

 

[John Vinson]

Has anyone ever imported data from a Revelation non-
relational database into access and made any sense of it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

<biting my tongue - unsuccessfully - to keep from calling this a Beast
of a job that will require a time, two times, and half a time to
complete, at a cost of $666 an hour>

I suspect that Revelation should be able to export its data to a text
file of some sort - tab delimited, comma delimited, whatever. Their
website (www.revelation.com) isn't letting me download so I'm not
sure; you might want to search it to see if they have an ODBC driver
(which Access would be able to use to directly open a Revelation
database).