We have a legacy system that was retired several years ago, that consisted of a simple Java application that used a Sybase instance (ASE 15) as its data store. We have now moved on to a new app using MySQL, and unfortunately discarded the old app, its source code, as well as the Sybase server software, but still have the dumps that were archived the day that the system was retired.
We now have a need to grab several large tables of data that are on those dumps, but for the life of us, can't figure out how to extract/export them.
In a perfect world, Sybase or some 3rd party would provide an open source tool that could work directly with the dump files. But the research I've done so far suggests that the dump file specification is proprietary and that no such tools exist (we don't want to have to spend any money on this "resurrection"...at least if all possible).
In lieu of that, my next guess would be to try and download a trial of Sybase, materialize the dump into a real, live DB, and then write a tiny extract script/tool that just connects to the DB and fetches the data that we need.
Am I heading down the right path or are there better ways/tools/methods of going about this?
You are headed down the right path. There are trial versions of ASE 15.7, that you should be able to use to get the database online.
One the database is online, you can use the Sybase bcp utility to extract data on a table by table basis in whatever format you need. If you don't need an entire table, but only a subset of a table, you can use views to filter unneeded data, and use bcp to export data from the view.
As the version of the ASE in the dumped database will likely be older than the version of ASE you are installing to do the restore, you will technically be doing a database upgrade, so you will want to review the installation documentation regarding upgrading databases.
Cross platform (Red Hat to Ubuntu) is supported, but it may take a few extra steps to get it working correctly, if the original database was dumped without plans to restore it on a different platform. You may have to force the database online using the norecovery option to allow you to truncate the transaction log, and flush the statistics, before it will come up normally.
The most complex part of the operation is likely to be setting up the container database in which to restore your dumped database. Sybase ASE needs the container database to have the same number of devices (and disk fragments), with the same sizes to properly restore. If this information is not known, then it can be found by first loading the dump header.
load database tempdb from DUMP_FILE with headeronly