Milan Babuskov wrote:

>
> 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.

VARCHARs are also stored in a not-so-textual way, because every string
is prefixed by a two-byte length field.

> 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.

Another problem could be field alignment on non-32bit platforms...


Dmitry