petesouthwest wrote:

> Thanks for the help and advice :)
>
> Any advice on the best way to proceed would be gratefully received!

Pete I've been away for a few days so apologies for not replying sooner.
Myles in his last post on this thread seemed to have summed up things
nicely.
I would stiff strongly advice that you read some of the stuff on
replication that I mentioned in my first post as this will give you a
deeper understanding of the issues involved. There is also a rather
nice article on the Firebird site:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=useful&id=calford_1
This is a rather in depth paper by someone who really knows what they
are talking about. Just a word of advice the paper favors a char field
for the unique key. I know that there has been discussion on this list
about the use of BIGINT or Char for the key so search the list and make
up your own mind. For me I can generally control my environments
sufficiently to be able to use a BIGINT and guarantee that is will
remain unique across all users of that DB.

If you want a tool to do the extraction and creation of a file for
transport then look at
FBEXPORT a freewhere tool developed by a regular on this list.
http://fbexport.sourceforge.net/

Regards
Andy