I caught this on IM Sagar Shah’s video about Chessbase 17: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf5NC-dmfQ8
If you have old (or even new databases) that were stored in the old .CBH format, you’ll want to upgrade them to the new .CB2 format. Chessbase doesn’t do this automatically for you – you’ll have to do that yourself. At this point, the databases that need to be converted manually:
- Mega Database 2023 and earlier (I’m assuming this will be true for Big Database as well)
- Correspondence Database 2022 and earlier
- Any other databases in the old CBH format EXCEPT the PGN downloads database. I learned that the hard way. 🙁
Don’t worry if the bottom of the screen is incorrect: as I’m converting a database, it says “Call-Convert to CBH format.” It’s really converting to the CB2 format.
And I do believe that one of the ads surrounding the new format is incorrect: there are still multiple files for the database. When I converted the database, I see:
- Correspondence Database 2022.2cba
- Correspondence Database 2022.2cbg
- Correspondence Database 2022.2cbh
- Correspondence Database 2022.2lcd
- Correspondence Database 2022.2lgd
- Correspondence Database 2022.2lid
- Correspondence Database 2022.ini
- and two other files that weren’t touched ending in .cko, .cpo.
The Mega Database will take about 40 minutes or so (at least it did for me on a relatively older machine with a 1tb SSD and 6 gig of memory committed to Windows – your time will likely be shorter than mine). The Correspondence Database took less than 5 minutes. The Mega Database was much quicker on a Windows desktop with 24 gig of memory.
The upgrade will also increase the sizes of the database files as well. Mega Database 2023 appears to be at least 2-3x the size of the original files.
The main benefit, according to Shah, is to check the database for “beautiful” games. Let’s be honest: a patzer such as me won’t have many beautiful games. The idea is to look at games of superior players to understand what they’re thinking about in particular positions.