Recently I've begun working on exploring ways to convert about 16k Corel Paradox 4.0 database tables (my client has been using a legacy platform over 20 years mainly due to massive logistical matters) to more modern formats (i.e.CSV, SQL, etc.) en mass and so far I've been looking at PHP since it has a library devoted to Paradox data processing however while I'm fairly confident in how to write the conversion code (i.e. simply calling a few file open, close, and write functions) I'm concerned about error detection and ensuring that when running the script, I don't spend hours waiting for it to run only to see 16k corrupt files exported.
Also, I'm not fully sure about the logic loop for calling the files. I'm thinking of having the program generate a list of all the files with the appropriate extension and then looping through the list, however I'm not sure if that's ideal for a directory of this size.
This is being run on a local Windows 7 x64 system with XAMPP setup (the database is all internal use) so I'm not sure if pure PHP is the best idea -- so I've been wondering if Python or some other lightweight scripting language might be better for handling this.
Thanks very much in advance for any insights and assistance,