Monday, January 13, 2014

Stellar Phoenix Repair for SQL Anywhere

Stellar Phoenix Repair for SQL Anywhere is a database recovery tool for version 9, 10, 11 and 12 SQL Anywhere databases that was introduced in September 2012. I don't have any databases that need recovery, so this isn't a product review, more like a "first glance".

Hubba, Hubba!

OK, at first glance it is impressive... any utility that can open a 16 million row, 11G .db file without launching SQL Anywhere itself, and display all the table names, and all the data, has my attention.

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The GUI does have a few glitches. First of all, the right hand data pane doesn't display the table name, so it's easy to lose track of which table you're looking at when the name is no longer highlighted in the left pane... which is what happens when you click anywhere on the right pane.

Also, if you resize the column widths in the right pane, they tend to revert back to the (narrow) defaults if you click on something else, like the (same) table name in the left pane.

...but, the Stellar Phoenix Repair tool isn't ISQL or Sybase Central, you're not going to use it to write reports, you're going to use it ... when ... you're ... absolutely ... desperate to get your data back.

How well it works for that purpose, I don't know... and I'm not sure how to go about finding out other than waiting until I'm ... absolutely ... desperate :)


1 comment:

Vest said...

Interesting tool, thanks!
It seems that it first decrypts the database. E.g. my original file was default.db (from SUP), and I got the new file: default.qbw.decrypted

After that the application works with the created file completely. On each request (read data or SQL triggers), it does the random access to this file. Read few bytes here, few bytes there.

For me it looks that the guy know the database structure, and he works with data on the binary level.

Is the DB file structure documented somewhere?