I need to import various data into a firebird 2.0 database. Some of the text fields have various representations in other desktop databases (Paradox and Access), mostly as ASCII with some characters from non-ASCII code pages. Most of the unusual charcters are German, Finnish, Swedish and Portugese. I would like to store the text data in VARCHAR and BLOB text fields (depending on the length of the text) in UTF-8 format but need to be sure that characters are correctly encoded in the pumping process.

I have tried using software (such as IBPUMP) that I previously used for ASCII text and numeric data pumping but find that I now get problems such as "can not tranliterate ..." associated with the fields in the database when I try to backup and restore my Firebird 2.0.5 database.

I am not sure whether the problems are something I have created in the database but am more inclined to think that the issue stems from the pumping software not being able to convert and represent characters appropriately for unicode use since I never had this problem when lilimiting text to ASCII characters with codes below 128.

Please could somebody confirm that this is the most likely case. I would also appreciate suggestions on the best way to pump text (and numeric) data from desktop databases to Firebird and some suggestions for software to use for this purpose.

Thanks
Bruce