Withdata Software
-
Getting a File Out of a BLOB Column Without Writing a Script
The two Stack Overflow questions are years old and very busy: “Script to save varbinary data to disk” (121,094 views, 55 votes) and “How to dump a file stored in a sqlite database as a blob” (37,133 views, 53 votes). The answers are the same shape in both: write a loop, read the column row…
-
Excel to SQL Server: The Three Ways the Import Lies
The xlsx is on disk, the table is empty, and the wizard says it copied 4 rows. Then you subtract: the spreadsheet had 6. Two rows went somewhere, and nothing in the log says where. That is the shape of most “excel to sql server” searches: not “how do I import”, but “why is the…
-
Open a 1.2 GB JSON or 700 MB XML File Without a Hex Editor
The two questions on Stack Overflow are old and enormous: “Is there any JSON viewer to open large json files (windows)?” has 130,128 views, 62 votes and no accepted answer; “Lightweight XML viewer that can handle large files” has 180,242 views and 183 votes. The answers are the tell: the top-voted JSON answer (29 votes)…
-
Excel Won’t Open a 350 MB File: The Row Ceiling, the Memory Wall, and What Actually Opens It
The workbook is on your disk. Double-click it, and Excel either shows “Excel cannot complete this task with available resources”, sits at 0% until the file stops responding, or opens 1,048,576 rows and quietly stops. The file is not corrupt, and re-saving it from the machine that made it will not help: Limit Value What…
-
BigDataFileViewer 1.0 Released: Open 1 GB CSV and 300 MB Excel Files in a Grid
November 12, 2026 — Withdata Software announces BigDataFileViewer 1.0, a read-only viewer that opens CSV, Excel (.xlsx), JSON and XML files of any size in a grid — 817 MB and twelve million rows, or a 300 MB workbook, without loading the file into memory. It is the answer to the question the other tools…
-
Excel to SQL Server: The Three Ways the Import Lies
The xlsx is on disk, the table is empty, and the wizard says it copied 4 rows. Then you subtract: the spreadsheet had 6. Two rows went somewhere, and nothing in the log says where. That is the shape of most “excel to sql server” searches: not “how do I import”, but “why is the…
-
The Big CSV: What Opens It, What Splits It, and What Only Looks Like It Works
A CSV of a few gigabytes is not a corrupted file, and the machine is not too slow. Three different limits are being hit at once, and they are easy to confuse: What you tried What actually stopped you double-click it, Excel opens 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per sheet; past that Excel truncates without…
-
CSV in Excel: The Zeros, the 15-Digit Barcode, and the Date That Moves
A CSV is text. Excel is not a text editor: the moment it opens a .csv it parses every field into a value — a number, a date, a boolean — and the text you sent is gone. Three things go wrong in that parse, and all three look like corruption: What you sent What…
-
CSV Import: The Zip Code That Becomes an Integer, and the Text That Becomes Question Marks
Importing a CSV looks like it should be the easy half of data work: no server, no schema, just text and commas. It is the half that produces the strangest support threads — a file that imports “successfully” and a column that quietly lost its leading zeros, a name that arrived as Caf?? Z??rich, a…
-
Why Your .dbf Opens Empty, Garbled, or Not at All
A .dbf file looks like the simplest database in the world: fixed-width records, a header, no server. That is why it is so often the file that arrives by email with no explanation — payroll exports, a shipping list, a fifteen-year-old application’s table. It is also why it fails in ways that look like corruption…