At 02:41 PM 22-10-02 -0500, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have become involved in a project in which we have to extract some data
>out of an application based on Interbase v 5.1 (at least that the version I
>am told). We need to move the data to an IBM AS/400 environment so we'd
>either like a fixed length record or delimited, mostlikely csv, record.
>
>Glancing through the documentation for IB 6 that's available on IB Phoenix's
>website it looks like gbak might do this sort of export. Am I on the right
>track here

Out of the box, probably not. A gbak file does store data in a text format
which you could analyse with some kind of custom parser.

> or is there a better way?

Many of the available admin tools have export utilities. Look at the list
in the Downloads > Contributed pages of the ibphoenix site; or just pick
up the free IB_SQL from www.ibobjects.com, which has an export tool
exporting either FF or csv. If you are going to convert to native AS/400
your larger problem might be translating the exported ASCII data to ebcdic.

>Could anyone point me to a
>documentation set for a 5.x version of IB?

You used to be able to purchase a media kit from Borland for about $60. I
don't know if it's still available. However, the IB 6 beta docs (from the
downloads > InterBase page of the ibphoenix site) are not a lot
different. There is nothing in those docs that describes anything as
low-level as the format of the gbak file though.

heLen