Art, you forgot to add: "That'll be $500 please".  You're going to find this
new life in Consultancy quite difficult, aren't you? ;-)

Sentence 1 is correct.

Sentence 2 is not - you could use the DB-Access distributed with SE 5.x
or 7.x to access the SE database via the corresponding (newer) sqlexec
(though DB-Access itself never directly accesses any database, of
course).  Moreover, the conversion from 2.10 to 5.x would pretty much
occur automatically; I'm 95% sure it would work with 7.x as well, but it
is a decade and more since I had a copy of 2.10 to play with, so I can't
be absolutely certain.

DB-Export arrived on the scene with 2.10.03x, IIRC, and probably was not
available with 2.10.00.  That is a hazy recollection (we are talking
about 1987 vintage code, though).  Hmmm, some documentation I wrote back
in Feb 1990 shows some output from DB-Schema 2.10.03F and that includes
the copyright date 1988.  The earliest version of the code that is
documented is a year earlier - Feb 1989.  So, depending on which 2.10
version the OP (Vomaringo) actually has, there may or may not be a
DB-Access to use.

Since Vomaringo mentions DB-Access 7.25, it should mean he or she has SE
7.25 on hand; there never was an IDS 7.25.

Vomaringo,

Was the data produced on the same machine as where you are running SE
7.25?  Or was the old machine a PC (Intel x86) machine and is the new
machine also x86?  If so, you are far from irrecoverable - as long as
you've been messing with a copy of the database and not the only copy of
the data. When you say "querying with DB-Access doesn't work", what
error message do you get?  What have you got set in the environment?
Which directory is your current directory; which directory contains the
database directory?  What is the value of DBPATH?  Can you use the 7.25
DB-Access to get at other, not so ancient databases?