ChessBase - One File Format to Rule them All

As of Chessbase 11 and 12, Chessbase offers to put database files into one file with *.cbone extension. That seems very convenient compared to cbv files that cannot be viewed or modified without unpacking, and sure beats dozens of random extension (cbh, cbg, etc) files that were getting created/deleted behind the scenes in the old paradigm. For emailing games around, or backing up databases, cbone seems great. But I don't want to convert my databases unless I know that the new format is reliable. I will  experiment with cbone in the next while and see how this goes.
So far a couple of issues I can think of are:

• I noticed that read-only cbone files cause errors, even when opened up for viewing
• It is obvious that any older program such as Chessbase Light would not able to read cbone file format

Has anyone else noticed other problems?

Rooks and Bishops – Find the best move

Matnadze, Ana - Gagunashvili, Merab
GEO-ch I Liga  2002.04.27  

White to move


Wirig, Anthony - Loetscher, Roland
Mitropa Cup 22nd  2003.05.19  

White to move

These positions are taken from my E-book about endgames with bishops of opposite colour:

The book is formatted for electronic readers and can be read on devices of various sizes, from tablets to phones. The free sample includes 3 thoroughly annotated games and the full book comes with dozens of training positions to help develop a good sense for positions with bishops of opposite colour.

I think ebooks are a very promising media for chess content, and would be very interested to hear what you think about it.

Database files for chess books

Having recently flipped through all 7 of Kasparov's recent books (5 volumes of My Great Predecessors, Revolution in the 70s and the latest Kasparov-Karpov 1975- 1985), I want to have the games in a computer database. What a common nerdy desire! Books are great for calmly re-playing through the moves, but what if I want to add a variation refuting Kasparov's analysis (notes on the margin?), or reference a game from the book in my own analyzed game? I also want to have a collection of games that are useful for understanding the middlegames arising from the openings that I play, and Kasparov's books are good for learning about historic development of plans and ideas (but only some games are relevant to my repertoire).

Seems like I already paid for the contents of the books, I would not be violating anything by having them on my computer (especially - if they are without annotations). A while back gambitchess.com started a great collection of database files for published books, but they don't have Kasparov's books. Yet looking around the Internet, I can only find 2nd and 4th volume of My Great Predecessors in pgn/chessbase formats. Chessgames.com has the collections of games that I need, but I can't download them in one shot without becoming a paid member. Seems like I might just have to download them one by one ...

Chess database formats - PGN vs. Chessbase

In what format do you store your chess data? This question has plagued me for years, so I finally decided to blurb it all out. There are at least popular 3 file formats I can think of - Chessbase (CB) binary format (cbh, cbv, etc), Chess Assistant (CA) binary format, and standard text pgn format (with the spec here). Most other chess databases, such as SCID, Jose, etc also have their own binary formats, but I am not as familiar with those. There have also been a few efforts to represent chess databases in some open XML format, but of all schemas proposed, none has really gained enough popularity. At least most chess games available on the net are still available only in either PGN, Chessbase, or CA formats.

So what tools are available for dealing with each format? Virtually every chess tool can read pgn. Chessbase does not handle Chess Assistant at all, Chess Assistant allows you to read Chessbase format, which is pretty impressive, given that no other non-chessbase tool does that. So what are the advantages pgn format versus say, chessbase?

PGN advantages: 1) it is free to in the sense that you don't need a proprietary software to view its contents (SCID would do the job), has an open spec, so 'anybody' can implement a parser. There are few parsers available in source code (I managed to find c++, C# and perl parsers, there are probably others). That being said, I suggest you do not write your own parser, because it is not a trivial task, but rather take an existing one (of course as long as license is not an issue).

2) since PGN is text-based - one can just load them in notepad, as long as the file size is not prohibitively large. Pgn is also very readable - the moves are just in algebraic notation. If you store your personal games in PGN, you can version control them as well, and look at the differences between revisions. It is also trivial to merge multiple PGN files into one via a one line in DOS.

3) A lot of free command line and GUI PGN tools are already available. pgn-extract is a great command line tool for filtering pgn games for material, position, or tag information (e.g. ECO, or Players). Palview is great for generating html with javascript for replaying games. In fact I use pgn-extract and Palview together to generate content for this blog, but this is worth another post. This site is a great resource on chess database utilities, most of which operate on pgn.

So if PGN has so many advantages, why use anything else for storing chess databases? Why create all these compatibility issues between multiple chess database vendors? Same reason as why XML is not used as a backend storage for storing data in SQL databases - performance.

Chessbase format provides more than performance improvements though: 1) In addition to performance, filesize is also smaller - chessbase splits up databases into multiple files, and that allows for some normalization of headers, etc.

2) Multimedia support - one can embed audio and video into games.

3) it can be a real database - in addition to raw moves, chessbase stores other metadata, such as opening and endgame keys, allows to tag positions with so called "medals" and so on.

I have been using Chessbase light for storing my games since around 1998, and just don't want to lose all the tagging that I've added to my games for many years. So currently I maintain keep old databases in Chessbase format, and whenever I create new smaller databases (say, for selected games by Kramnik in the Sveshnikov), because Chessbase light can still edit them, performance is not an issue, and I don't have to re-export all games into PGN for using Palview.