How to get at the database schema of a hidden DB?

Question

My customer is a dental practice that has bought a piece of practice management software. This software was installed on their local server, including a patient database, a sch

Answer 1

I have written my own PHP driven website to access and manipulate data in my eaglesoft database. You simply create odbc connection to local DNS entry and done. To see database structure you can use the technical reference included in eaglesoft or advanced query tool.

Answer 2

A few tools that might help are SQLWorkbench and Django. I use SQLWorkbench to copy the data from the production system into a Postgres database so I can hack on it without damaging the production environment. Then I use Django's inspectdb to generate models of the database environment. From there it's easy to create 'views' into the database and templates to display exactly what I want.

UPDATE: As of Eaglesoft 19, it looks like Patterson has password protected the database and they have gone out of their way to prevent users from getting at the data without paying them for access.

UPDATE: Like I mentioned before, Eaglesoft 19 has a locked-down version of the database. For read-only access you can call Patterson and ask them for the password to the "Database Admin" section of their "Technical Reference" tool that is installed on your server. Once you are in there, there's an option to set a read-only password for access to the database. The username is 'dba' and whatever password you set. Some times it takes a bit of back-and-forth with them to give you access, but my solution was to say "We've been putting patient data into Eaglesoft for over a decade and we've always had access to the database. Now you're restricting it and telling us we have to pay for access. It sounds like you are trying to extort money by holding our data hostage. I should probably run this by our legal team."

Answer 3

Turns out the simplest way to do it was to write a little app using OdbcDbConnection, and connect using the DSN installed with the software. It took one probing 'select * from sysobjects' to reveal that it is, indeed a MS-SQL database underneath all that, and I'm good to go from there!

Answer 4

I'd use a tool like squirel which is great at browsing any database to check if anyone was successful with "SQL Anywhere" this google result:

http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.squirrel-sql.users/month=20091001

Shows that others have managed to get squirrel to do this. It's quite easy to use... assuming of course you manage to get the connection working!