Palm and Treo Hacks

Investigate Your Palm’s Databases

Every .pdb file on your Palm is a database associated with an application. Find out what databases are installed on your Palm device and get more information about them.

The simplest way to investigate .pdb files is to hit the Info menu item on the Applications menu in the built-in launcher. This will list the applications and some (but not necessarily all) of the .pdb files on your device. For example, if you have a document reader installed, then individual documents usually show up as installed .pdbs. From the Info menu, you have three display options: version, size, and records. For .pdbs, the version is frequently v0.0. This can help you distinguish a .pdb from an application.

Size is just how much memory the application or .pdb is using. Records indicates how many separate entries are in each .pdb or application. What a record contains is up to the person who wrote the program. It could be a single name, address, and phone combination, or it could be a single saved game.

You can use this level of investigation to try to find orphaned data. Sometimes, when you remove an application, one or more .pdbs may be left behind. For example, if you downloaded a Bingo game but later removed it, then you might find something like BingoData. In that case, you could delete it from the launcher.

Sometimes it can be unclear what some of the things in the list are. There are a number of run-time libraries that some applications use. These can have names like ...