sdbtool 0.9.4

Interact with .sdb (application compatibility shim database) files

sdbtool

A tool for converting Microsoft Application Compatibility Database (SDB) files to XML format.

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Table of Contents

1. Features
2. Getting Started
3. Contributing

Features

• Parses SDB files used by Windows for application compatibility.
• Converts SDB data into readable XML or JSON format.
• Dump file attributes in SDB-recognizable format
• Useful for analysis, migration, or documentation.
• Pure Python and cross-platform - no native apphelp.dll dependency.

Getting Started

Installation

Sdbtool is available as sdbtool on PyPI.

Invoke sdbtool directly with uvx:

uvx sdbtool sdb2xml your.sdb                        # Convert the file 'your.sdb' to xml, and print it to the console
uvx sdbtool sdb2xml your.sdb --output your.xml      # Convert the file 'your.sdb' to xml, and write it to 'your.xml'
uvx sdbtool sdb2json your.sdb                       # Convert the file 'your.sdb' to json, and print it to the console
uvx sdbtool sdb2json your.sdb --output your.json    # Convert the file 'your.sdb' to json, and write it to 'your.json'
uvx sdbtool sdb2xml old.sdb --target-os 0501        # Resolve tag names as of Windows XP (for older databases)
uvx sdbtool attributes your.exe                     # Show the file attributes as recognized by apphelp in an XML-friendly format
uvx sdbtool info your.sdb                           # Show some details about the SDB file (version, description, ...)

Or install sdbtool with uv (recommended), pip, or pipx:

# With uv.
uv tool install sdbtool@latest  # Install sdbtool globally.

# With pip.
pip install sdbtool

# With pipx.
pipx install sdbtool

Updating an installed sdbtool to the latest version with uv:

# With uv.
uv tool upgrade sdbtool

# With pip.
pip install --upgrade sdbtool

# With pipx.
pipx upgrade sdbtool

Tag names and --target-os

Tag names are not constant across Windows versions: some are renamed (e.g. OS_PLATFORM became GUEST_TARGET_PLATFORM), and some are dropped (e.g. OS_SKU exists on XP but not on Windows 11). sdb2xml / sdb2json therefore accept --target-os <VERSION> to resolve names as of a particular Windows release; without it, names are resolved against the newest known table. An unknown tag is rendered as InvalidTag_0xXXXX.

RUNTIME_PLATFORM (0x4021)

The tag id 0x4021 has two unrelated encodings depending on the database version:

• Version 3 (Windows 10+): one DB-level tag holding a (guest, host) architecture pair bitmask (RuntimePlatformType, e.g. AMD64 | X86_ON_AMD64).
• Version 2 (Vista..Windows 8.1): a per-entry tag holding a little-endian list of up to three host-platform selector bytes (0x40 | code), OR-combined, with bit 0x80000000 negating the match (RuntimePlatformV2Type). Codes: 0=X86, 9=AMD64, 6=IA64, 12=WOW64 (any 32-bit-on-64-bit), 13=NATIVE64 (any native 64-bit). Reversed from SdbpCheckRuntimePlatform in pre-Win10 apphelp.dll; e.g. 0x4D4C40 -> X86 | WOW64 | NATIVE64.

sdbtool decodes each form according to the file's header major version.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open issues or submit pull requests.