Reverse Engineering an Undocumented Binary Format to SQL

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had to get data out of an old piece of software from 2020 whose files looked unreadable: a few hundred binary files, no documentation, and I wanted to query them with SQL. This post is about the method, how to find the containers, the record layouts and the links between files from the data alone, and how to check you’re not fooling yourself along the way.

Reverse-Engineering on soyuka.me

Reverse Engineering an Undocumented Binary Format to SQL