Has anyone decoded (i.e., reverse engineered) the format of the Quicken database? Is it published somewhere? I'm impressed that they have a design that has remained secret since the late 1980s even though I'm sure many of their programming staff have come and gone.
Quicken database format?
Dec 03, 2009
5 Replies
First reply
True, and that's another impressive feature of the design. Quicken for any year can read all prior databases. I imagine something like a random number seed that changes each year.
Read the full replyStubby wrote in news:4803baf6-40e7-46fe- snipped-for-privacy@d21g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
The schema of the database has changed over the years.
True, and that's another impressive feature of the design. Quicken for any year can read all prior databases. I imagine something like a random number seed that changes each year.
Just put a version number in the data file. That's easy.
What is impressive is not how it is done, but that Intuit decided to do it. Intuit is not the most customer-oriented company out there.
I don't think that's true. I have many old Q disks that my current version, Q2009, cannot comprehend.
Many years, when I upgraded, the former version's database had to be converted. If one "spread" too far - if, for example, one tried to leap from Q2000 to Q2007 - the program couldn't manage it, and you had to find an intermediate version such as Q2004 to "pre-convert" the ancient database.
But maybe I'm quibbling. Maybe all you meant to say that users of older versions were never orphaned, because Q(n) could always upconvert the data from Q(n-1). But if that's all you meant, that's faint praise; what program ever did such a thing?
Doug
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