Paradox DB file signature

Question

I'm searching in web for magic numbers for Paradox DB files (.db), but there are no results.

What binary signature for these files?

Answer 1

I hate to answer this question because identifying the type of a file by its contents is inherently unreliable -- a binary signature tells you only that the file MAY be of a certain type, but there's no guarantee that another file won't happen to contain that string.

Also, binary signature recognition of *.DB files is weak because almost all the bytes carry highly variable information, and most of the constant bytes are zero:

 byte  constant
offset  value
  --     --
   2     00
   3     08
   E     00
   F     01
  14     00
  2A     00
  2B     00
  2C     00

(all values in this answer are given in hexidecimal)

There's probably lots of non *.DB files that will accidentally match this pattern.

A couple more bytes are easily interpreted and provide additional information:

byte offset 4:
  00 = indexed .DB data file
  01 = primary index .PX file
  02 = non-indexed .DB data file
  03 = non-incrementing secondary index .Xnn file
  04 = secondary index .Ynn file (inc or non-inc)
  05 = incrementing secondary index .Xnn file
  06 = non-incrementing secondary index .XGn file
  07 = secondary index .YGn file (inc or non inc)
  08 = incrementing secondary index .XGn file

byte offset 39:
  03      version 3.0
  04      version 3.5
  05..09  version 4.x
  0A..0B  version 5.x
  0C      version 7.x

Borland never published the internal format of its data base files. I think that to reliably identify a *.DB file by its contents you would have to try to open it with Borland's data base engine.

-Al.