Paradox

Paradox

Paradox is a file database engine currently published by Corel Corporation. Original Paradox for DOS was released in 1985 by Ansa Software, which was purchased by Borland in 1987. Paradox for DOS was successful in 1980s and 1990s, as it was a very fast database thanks to its caching capabilities, visual query-by-example and innovating programming language PAL.

Paradox for Windows was a complete rewrite and delayed to market enough for Microsoft Access to launch earlier. That was a significant blow to Paradox. When Microsoft lowered the price of its Access database to $99, Borland lost significant revenue. When Microsoft bundled Access into Microsoft Office Professional, stand-alone database products like Paradox completely lost their market.

Today Paradox is an obsolete database and shouldn’t be used. Borland never released database structure information, making it hard to migrate the database away. However, by using the information found in the excellent pxlib open-source library we were able to write our own Paradox reader component. We can even handle encrypted Paradox tables.

Full Convert supports Paradox database directly.

Paradox data types we support

Integral

int, smallint

Decimal

double, money

Text

text, varchar

Date/Time

date, time, timestamp

Large objects

blob, text

Other

bool

Export Paradox database

It may make sense to migrate your data away from Paradox. You may want to do it permanently or just need to share your tables with a collague in a different format.

We will copy all your tables with their data and apply indexing and relationships exactly as they are in your current Paradox database. In a nutshell, you get exactly the same database in another database engine. Each time you run the migration, we will copy all the tables again. Of course, we have a built-in scheduler, so you can run this overnight and have a fresh database copy in the morning.

Take a look at the quick tutorials below to see how it's done.