Btrieve Error: Could not load Pervasive Extended Data Type Conversion library - PEDTCONV.dll

Symptom

A possible scenario that can happen through the Btrieve migration process is when a popup error is shown: “ERROR: could not load Pervasive Extended DataType Conversion library (pedtconv).  Please contact support before continuing to use the application.”

Cause

Btrieve supports a good number of data types natively; however, there are many more used by the different programming languages that can utilize Btrieve.  For instance, Btrieve supports dates by using a four byte binary structure with year, month and day.  Many applications store dates as a string or as a Julian value.

By default, these values would be defined in the DDF (Pervasive.SQL Schema) as just a string or a number.  Migrating this information to SQL as defined is okay; but what if you want to write a SQL query comparing two such fields.  Comparing a string date (“10-10-2009”) to a number (19354839) just isn’t going to produce a desirable result.  It would be much better if both used a real date data type.

Resolution

Pervasive introduced an extra DDF long ago called FieldExt.ddf which allows further definition of almost 30 more types.  To read these types, Pervasive has a library called the Pervasive Extended Data Type Conversion Library which lives in the PEDTCONV dll found in their Active-X SDK.  This can be downloaded from the Pervasive Developer Center: http://www.pervasive.com/developerzone/sdk/.  When installing the SDK, be sure to install the Redistributable files.

Once you have the pedtconv.dll file, copy it into the application directory where the Mertech w3btrv7/w3btrv7 dll lives.