sdbtool 0.9.0

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, ...)

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, keeping its raw number visible.

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

Contributing

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

Regenerating the tag tables

The tag-id → name tables live in sdbtool/apphelp/tags/tags.json as a base table plus per-version add / override / remove deltas. They are produced offline from every apphelp.dll version by tools/generate_tags.py, which calls the DLL's SdbTagToString export. This generator is author-only and is not shipped in the package.

Each DLL is read with Speakeasy (Mandiant's emulator): it parses and emulates the PE regardless of bitness, so one 64-bit run handles the x86 (XP / 2003) DLLs as well as DLLs the OS refuses to load natively (some Win7/8.1 apphelp.dll fail a real LoadLibrary with WinError 182). Speakeasy lives in the optional gen dependency group; emulating every export call is slow (minutes for the full set), which is fine for this offline step.

uv run --group gen python tools/generate_tags.py --data-dir path\to\apphelp\dlls

The data directory is expected to contain <version>/<arch>/apphelp.dll files (e.g. 0501/x86/apphelp.dll, 0A00-26200/x64-64/apphelp.dll); add more versions by dropping their apphelp.dll in and regenerating.