Thanks for suggesting some alternatives. Unfortunately, the Access
database has Blob fields in many of the tables. Also, it is part of
a commercial app and is installed in hundreds of locations scattered
all over the US. The data pumping needs to be be pretty invisible to
the end user.

I was hoping to find something more direct than making intermediate
tables. I am now toying with reading records from the Access tables
via ADO, and then writing them into FB. I've done this kind of thing
before, and one record at a time is painfully slow.

--- In IBObjects@yahoogroups.com, Helen Borrie <helebor@t...> wrote:
> At 05:30 PM 27/08/2004 +0000, you wrote:
> >1. Will IB Datapump allow transfer of data from an Access database
> >to Firebird?
>
> Not directly: it's native-to-native. But, if you can output the
Access
> data as fixed-length text records, you can hitch it to an external
> table. Then you can use the datapump.
>
> >2. If so, can field values be manipulated in the transfer?
Example,
> >can Access fields that contain words such as "TRUE" or "FALSE" be
> >mapped to smallint 1 or 0 before inserting into the Firebird
field?
>
> Yes. You do very fine-grained source-to-dest mapping.
>
> Other alternatives:
>
> If you can export the Access tables in .CSV format, another
alternative is
> to use TIB_Import to acquire the .CSV data as a raw native table
and use
> that as the source for TIB_Datapump. It's not useful if you have
blob
> data, though.
>
> Alternatively, use Delphi's BDE datapump to create your raw table
as an
> InterBase table; then use that table as the source.
>
> Helen