What is Btrieve Btrieve is a very popular file system used worldwide in a lot of applications, such as accounting systems. It has been in use from the early DOS ages, and is still being used by a lot of larger software development companies, because it is a stable and very fast way to access data in a network environment.
Btrieve is a product of Pervasive Software, Inc.

Btrieve data can be accessed using ODBC, and through the Btrieve API. Vo2Btrieve uses the API, to get the best performance possible.

Btrieve files have no built in information about the structure of the data files. Programmers have searched for various ways to cope with this, and this has resulted in a number of different solutions:

• Structure of the tables is stored in the program
• Structure of the tables is stored in an external file
• Structure of the tables is stored in a Data Dictionary

The last solution is by far the most popular. The so-called DDF format is widely used. Vo2Btrieve supports all three ways of describing the table structure.