> 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.

Ah, right, I guess.

> >>> 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.

But non-char data is stored differently (binary format), so I thought this
was
puzzling.

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - tool for InterBase, Firebird, MySQL, NexusDB, Oracle &
MS SQL Server
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com
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http://blog.upscene.com/martijn/
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