I’m assisting another collection in our museum with the initial mapping for their Sp7 conversion process, and to do some background research on the structure of their data I need to read an old backup of their database that is in the form of a .mdf Microsoft SQL server file from March 2011 generated in Specify 5.
I was able to open the file in an SQL editor, but it looks mostly like tables for a web frontend. Without documentation or knowledge of how Sp5 worked, it’s hard for me to interpret this.
I cannot find Sp5’s documentation on the forum or elsewhere online, nor can I find a copy of the schema version that it used. Do these still exist somewhere? If so, it would be great to have them uploaded in the documentation section in the forum, and/or somewhere on GitHub for posterity to help people who might find themselves in this situation.
Paging veteran Specificianado @AndyBentley, any tips?
Update: while we have gotten all of the tables to be readable, it would really be more convenient I think for us to view the data in Specify natively. Is there any chance someone on staff still knows how to convert Sp5 files to Sp6, and if so, would it be possible to get that done for this file?
We are working on this internally as well and I’ve asked our team to follow up with you on this point!
For future reference, I have used a Windows 7 32-bit virtual machine to convert the SQL Server 2005 databases to MySQL using the latest supported version of HeidiSQL on that OS version.
The code our team used years ago to convert Specify 5 databases to Specify 6 after it was converted to MySQL is still available in the main Specify 6 codebase:
It needs to be built in a developer environment to be run, but this may provide some guidance. I am hopeful one of our developers can provide more information on performing this migration, and @SpecifyMembership can speak to you about options our team can provide to facilitate this conversion.
