Martijn Tonies wrote:

>> Martijn Tonies wrote:
>>> You do know that an "external table" in Firebird is a plain text file,
>> Nope, it's a binary file.
>
> Eh, huh?

Dates and such can be stored in binary (as opposed to text) format if
you declare external table in such way. Try creating an external table
with other types than (var)char and inserting into it.

>>> If so, you can just read the DBF table and create plain text from it in
>>> a small application, then use Firebird to transfer the data between the
>>> external table and an internal table.
>> I'd rather suggest to remove the DBF header section and use the rest of
>> the file as an FB external table ;-) This won't work for NULLs and blobs
>> though...
>
> Dmitry, what ARE you talking about?

DBF stores data in fixed-length records, so if all data is character
based, it can be imported directly via external table. The only problem
is when you need to do some conversion of data.


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