OK, not everybody is a data geek like I am. But chances are, if you are truly a power user, then a real difficult database problem comes along once in a while. A spreadsheet program like Excel won’t cut it on everything, and sometimes screws up importing a file more than it helps, or doesn’t have enough rows to handle the entire file. And sorting that big file sends your computer into a deep sleep. You need a good way to convert one type of database file to another. Simply and easily. That program is DBMS copy.

You wont find it at your local COMPUSA, it’s really an industrial-strength database converter and copier. It is dead-on simple to use: the interface is not flashy, but extremely efficient. Load a file, and it creates the database in its own format. You can select or delete records, create new fields, control output, even print out some data analysis statistics. But it is magical in two ways. 1) You can save the resulting file in almost any reasonable file format, from Quattro Pro to FoxPro. ASCII Files with any delimiter and spacing. Convert your Lotus 1-2-3 files to an Oracle database. 2) It sorts files. Very, very well. Millions of records aren’t a problem for DBMS Copy (although they might take a long time – in the old days we had to wait a few days for the old 66Mhz machine to crank it all out) and it is stable under Windows.

It has a simple batch language, one that makes some particularly hairy database projects much easier, like taking a database, and splitting it to individual client files, so you can distribute individual databases for each client with ease. DBMS Copy is an elegant piece of software to convert databases from one type to another. It has only the best features to manipulate, sort, and augment a database, without any other so-called ‘functionality’. It is a swiss-army-knife piece of software that every database geek should have in their pocket.