[Tfug] Let's play "ID this code"! (serious issue actually)

[Zack Williams]

> I've been given some election databases in some sort of funky format I
> can't even ID yet, almost a gig in size.  File extension is .BAK so
> God only knows...I think some flavor of SQL but not certain.
>
> Going through them with a text editor (NEdit of all things) I was able
> to find chunks of what appear to be source code.  I've included some
> below.  Some of the dates in here point to it being 2005 or so
> vintage.  Can anybody ID this stuff, even roughly?

The "dbo" leads me to believe this was generated by a Microsoft
product, most likely SQL server if it's that large.  Thus, you're
going to need a copy of Windows to restore the backup unless you want
to try to reverse engineer their file format...

You can free download copies of the "Express" edition of this from
here, which should be sufficient for importing the backup, if my hunch
about the format is correct:

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/express.aspx

Note that the backup formats aren't universal -   You may need the
2000 or 2005 version of SQL Server Express.   I did a job a while ago
bringing data from SQL Server 6.5 on NT4 to SQL Server 2008 on Server
2008 x64, which required 2 intermediate machines with different
versions of SQL Server on specific processor architectures for the
convesion process.

Then, I'd attack it with either MS Access or Perl (the ActiveState
distribution is easy to install) - basically, you share out the data
as an ODBC datasource (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> ODBC),
then attach to it with one of those tools.

The "Audio" section leads me to believe that what you got may have
some very large audio blobs, with things like someone reading the
names of the candidates for the vision impaired.

- Zack