j-j.co.za

Over the last few days we ran a really large discovery scan on a client’s network. The scan was discontinued part of the way through and at that stage had produced a 650Mb .xml file. Smaller files are easy to load into Excel or Firefox to view and work with. With this much data we needed a more workable solution.

The first though was to import it into MS Access 2007. Access has built in import filters, easy enough we though. Two error lines in a table and no data brought an end to that hopeful idea. A little bit of googling found as a tool that promised to do pain free importing of XML into access, building the table structures on the fly and automatically creating the necessary table links.

The Exult XML converter from novixys.com was a lifesaver.We downloaded the trial, tested it on a scan of the local class C and it worked wonders, creating all the required tables and links. $105 later on the credit card and the full version was purchased.

Using it on out full scan file was a little trickier. Since we aborted the scan the .xml file hadn’t been properly completed. Exult didn’t like the incomplete file so threw out an error message and refused to build the access database.  A comparison of the short test scan and the full scan revealed the missing XML tags. We copied and pasted these over to the full file, updating the scan information manually, and saved the file. Running Exult again took a while (over an hour) but produced the required file. Perfect solution.

Thanks Novixsys.

We are scanning the rest of the network as we speak. Not sure how we will import the balance of the .xml files into the same database. Hopefully Exult can do that for us too. Will find out soon enough