Sundial Services
Professional Software Engineering Consultants Since 1992

Please Note: End-Of-Life Announcement

It is with great regret that we announce that ChimneySweep® 6.0 will be the final viable release of this system, and we plan no further development.

The product is 32-bit, as are all of the vendor-supplied core libraries (BDE™/IDAPI32™) upon which it fundamentally depends. (16-bit support was abandoned with Release 5.) Present and/or future versions of Windows® may not run such software. Furthermore, recent technical changes to the Windows-10 operating system appear to invalidate several principles of the underlying software foundations.

Therefore, it is now possible that both ChimneySweep and Paradox®/BDE will no longer run. It is also possible – this has been seen on the most-recent update to Windows 10 – that ChimneySweep will make changes to the table files, seeing no indication from Windows that anything went wrong, but the table files will not change ... or, will change for some users but not others.

All of these matters are beyond our control, and the software's. Since none of these core vendor technologies have been released as "open-source" by the apparently now-defunct business entities (Borland, Corel) that were once responsible for them, nor by their successors, we perceive for them no viable future, and we are afforded no opportunities to intervene.

So be it. May they Rest In Peace.™


"Click, click! It's fixed!™"

That slogan neatly sums up all of what ChimneySweep® is about. This innovative product encapsulates the entire process of repairing and/or maintaining any number of Paradox® (BDE™ = Borland Database Engine) tables into a self-contained job, so that all that your customers have to do is to "click, click!" the name of the job in order to run it. (Or, your own software product, built using Professional Edition, might directly incorporate that behavior into itself.)

Quickly adopted and deployed throughout the world, ChimneySweep very-quickly became the gold standard of Paradox database maintenance products, and it remains the only product of its kind.


Once started, the job runs to completion with no further human intervention. The job contains all of the settings which identify the table(s) to be processed, any passwords needed, optional table-structure and table-relationship information, and so on. Entirely automatically, ChimneySweep can (as you direct ...) do any of the following:

  • Detect table structure problems (missing records, etc.) and fix them – in place.
  • Verify primary and secondary indexes, and if necessary rebuild them – far faster than Paradox ever could – fixing "index out of date."
  • Verify, and if necessary restore, primary and auxiliary passwords, validity checks, and foreign-key relationships.
  • Perform reliable on-disk backups.

Our proprietary algorithms are, by actual tests, over 100 times faster than Paradox Table Repair (TUTILITY / TUTIL32), and far more reliable. In one of our earliest tests, TUTILITY chugged-along for many hours before ... failing to do what ChimneySweep did (on the same slow machine) in six minutes.


Please note our "NON-warranty policy!"

ChimneySweep is a repair product. But, it is impossible for it, or us, to know exactly what situation you might now be facing. We also do not know what underlying technical condition might be "the root cause." (This has become especially significant given the latest "Windows 10!") Therefore, it is simply impossible for us to offer any kind of "warranty."

Instead, first(!) we emphasize that "a computer database is both valuable and vulnerable!" The "lost" data that you might now be seeking to "recover" might, in fact, be irretrievably gone. It's simply impossible for us to say.

What we can say, however, is that "ChimneySweep® first appeared on the market in 1996, and many thousands of copies have since been sold since then to "people who swear by it."

Your easiest and most-common step forward – should you choose to take it – would be to buy a "30-day" time-limited license, which, if your situation really is "temporary," just might be all you need! But if not, you can then apply the full amount of that purchase, by means of a coupon code, to a "Traditional Edition" purchase. (Which, undoubtedly, will be the appropriate choice for you. The other two Editions are special-purpose.)


ChimneySweep comes in three "Editions," which vary only in the set of features which they provide. The runtime behavior and abilities of all ChimneySweep jobs is exactly the same: the product's abilities are not restricted, and any Edition can run jobs built by any other.

  • Traditional Edition: Interactively build, edit, and run jobs using the Job Editor wizard. (Ordinarily, this is the Edition that you want.)
  • Runtime Edition: Can run jobs created using Traditional or Professional edition, but cannot build or edit them.
  • Professional Edition: Includes APIs in the form of DLLs, Delphi-32 components, and an OCX control, with accompanying documentation specifically targeted at software developers and OEMs.

For evaluation purposes, and to handle "one-off" situations in a cost-effective way, we offer a 30-Day Time Limited License for Traditional Edition (only). This product is fully functional except for the time limit. (Note that there are no "free trials" of ChimneySweep – we very quickly realized that there must be no "hobbled horse.") Furthermore, within the 30-day period you can apply the full purchase price toward one purchase of either Traditional Edition or Professional Edition.


And, for the technically curious among you, here's a little bit of information about how it works ...