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Originally Posted by rjh
I wasn't referring to end users who really shouldn't need to know any of this stuff. I think the fault lies with vendors and marketing - who should know better.
.pdb files date from the early days of Palm. Palm had a very rudimentary filesystem in which "applications" used the extension .prc while the data related to these "applications" was contained in files with the .pdb extension.
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Actually Palm has no file system at all. the files were in RAM and accessed directly, not stored in a file system. There is no file name or extension. See the wiki on PDB for more details
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So .pdb (Palm database) actually refers to almost any data file on the Palm and can contain almost anything. For example, the Palm Address Book "application" is contained in a .prc file and it manipulates .pdb files with address book data inside them, but .pdb files for other applications can include saved game and game level data, memos, drawings, plucker documents, converted PDF documents, settings information, database contents and so on.
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When the database is moved to a pc there is a file extension added to help manipulate the file in windows. Note that the database name will be the name of the file and my not be anything like the name of the file when you installed it the first time.
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.pdb files that actually contain PalmDOC data are a very small proportion of all the .pdb files in use. The problem for me is that I use Plucker files extensively on the V3, and these also have the .pdb extension. This is appropriate in the Palm environment, where applications know which files belong to them from metadata associated with each file, but difficult once you move out of that environment.
It looks silly in retrospect, but nobody ever thought that the Palm would evolve into anything more than a very low powered organiser, let alone that Palm type documents would ever be used on other devices. There's a lesson to be learned here I think.
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It was not silly unless you only think as a windows pc person. It is the only OS that requires intelligent file name extensions.
Dale