Larry Hengen wrote:

> I am attempting to recreate our Firebird database in SQL Server
> including all data. I have contemplated using external tables to
> export from FB and then BULK INSERT into SQL Server.. Any suggestions?
>
> Anyone tried this? What are the limitations? Is this the fastest
> technique?

External tables will lose all NULLs you may have in tables. It should be the
fastest way, but surely not the most reliable.

Next fastest (which I would recommend too) is that you use some data-pump
that knows about Firebird and MSSQL server. There is freeware Interbase
DataPump by CleverComponents, but the last version I tried could only copy
from MSSQL to Firebird, and not the other way. If you have a few hours you
could write a simple PHP script to do it for you.

Slowest, but simplest would be to dump data as INSERT statements and just
execute that inserts on target. There are many tools which can do this, almost
every Firebird administration tool can. In case you go down this road and wish
to automate the process, you could use FBExport:

http://fbexport.sourceforge.net

HTH

--
Milan Babuskov
http://www.flamerobin.org