Read FoxPro DBF Files

Question

Can anyone help me with using a FoxPro DBF file as an input in Alteryx?

When I read the DBF in Access, I read it as a Visual FoxPro database.

When I import it into Alteryx as a dbf, I can see some of the fields, but not the float or dollar fields. If I tell it to output all fields as string, I can see the missing fields, but they appear to be corrupted.

atripp · Answer

Unfortunately I only have the ODBC driver on a remote server that is on an old version of Windows. I can't install Alteryx on the remote server.

I can extract the data to csv, but I was hoping to avoid that step since many of the files are 50M+ rows. Sounds like I might be stuck. Thanks for your advice!

danilang · Answer

Hi @atripp

MS completely stopped supporting Foxpro in about 2019, so links to the ODBC/OLEdb drivers on their sites are broken.   If you search visual foxpro ODBC, you'll come up with some results from non-MS sites, but I don't know that I'd trust any of them.

Since you have Access installed you may also have an ODBC driver installed that you may be able to use.  Check in ODBC Admin to see if you can set up a data source.

If not, consider a hybrid solution where you use Access to extract the data and then save it in a more modern format.

Dan