MiraMon DBF table editor. MiraDades
MiraDades is a DBF table viewer and editor. It is a Windows application part of the development of MiraMon. It is an easy to use application as it shows uses a view similar to the most common spreadsheet viewers where the rows are the table records and the columns are the table fields.
The application is very small (approximately 2 Mbytes) and it is distributed in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. MiraDades allows you to work with very large tables with many fields and records (more than 200,000 records) even on low performance computers.
With MiraDades you can edit the contents of DBF tables, restructure fields or records, order the tables, perform physical joins, and execute the basic operations on usual tables in a Geographic Information System.
DBF tables (with .dbf extension) were defined by dBASE some years ago and have fallen into some disuse in recent years, making it difficult to find a suitable tool for editing them. However, the ESRI Shapefile (SHP) format, one of the most popular formats still in the GIS sector, uses them mandatorily to store thematic attributes. MiraMon also uses them for the alphanumeric attribute tables of its structured vector formats, for the thesaurus tables and for color palettes.
MiraDades supports tables in dBASE III+ and dBASE IV formats (dBASE developed a late dBASE V format that was not very successful and it is not supported). The BASE IV format has a limitation of 256 fields per table and field names of 10 uppercase letters. MiraDades supports field types C, N, D and L (for text, numbers, dates and logical values respectively). MiraDades also supports a new format (defined by the MiraMon group) called extended DBF that overcomes these limitations and it is supported by the MiraMon software but not in the SHP format. This extended DBF format also uses the .dbf extension, but MiraDades treats it differently. It is possible to work with MiraDades limited to the dBASE IV format.
MiraDades takes into account the ANSI/OEM/UTF-8 character markup that affects the text fields of DBF tables and allows converting between markups.
Although the native format of MiraDades is DBF, the program can access any database, such as: MS-ACCESS, ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2 and also other tables such as EXCEL. To access these tables, MiraDades uses the ODBC technology included in Windows and that requires a driver for each format (the MS Office package includes several ODBC drivers for the usual formats).
Main features
- It incorporates the management of a new variant of DBF tables, called "extended DBF" ("Extended DBF" format specification, pdf), which allows a practically unlimited number of fields (about 13.4 million) and a practically unlimited length (2.1 billion byte characters) in the fields of type 'C' (character, text).
- It allows performing operations between fields, which can be automated for massive calculations through MiraDades command line requests. Among them, regressions can be performed, both linear simple or multiple as well as quadratic, between the fields of the table.
- The relationships between tables are managed from the Universal Geospatial Metadata Manager. GeM+, freely distributed.
- It is distributed free and does not require installation (it can work from any folder where it is copied, a USB stick, etc).
- It works offline, which makes it useful for working even when you don't have Internet connection.