jfiredump

A small utility to dump a Firebird database to a file of SQL INSERT statements.

DISCLAIMER: Please do not rely on this tool for backups! It is not well tested enough to be used in that role. The reason this tool was written was because I wanted to make the transition away from firebird easier (fb is a fine database, but it lacks support from many modern programming languages that some of us have to use). As such, dumps taken with this tool should be verified through some other means when used in production.

Alternatives

FBExport

fbexport does not handle BLOB SUB_TYPE TEXT as strings because it treats them as generic blobs, setting their value to NULL in the export.

DBeaver

DBeaver provides a competent exporter with way more options then this tool. It is however part of a rather large IDE and not really scriptable (outside of GUI automation - have fun with that).

Flamerobin

Flamerobin also allows exporting a database to INSERT statements (or other formats like csv) by running a SELECT query and then first selecting "Fetch all records" in the right-click menu, then selecting all records with Control-A and finally selecting "Copy as INSERT statements". This has the same problem as the exporter from DBeaver: it is not scriptable and therefore requires quite a bit of manual labor to use.

Other Alternatives?

I would not be aware of any other tools that can dump a firebird table/database to INSERT statements, but I will gladly add them here if they are brought to my attention.

Compatibility

Jfiredump was built for firebird version 2.x. Major version 3 and up is not supported and neither is major version 1. It could work with these versions, but you should probably expect some incompatibilities.

It should correctly handle all common types except blob types (although BLOB SUB_TYPE TEXT will be treated as a normal string). Warnings will be displayed when an unsupported type is encountered.

Usage

You can run the java file with java -jar jfiredump-VERSION.jar (obviously replace VERSION with whatever version you use). The available command line arguments should be mostly self-explanatory and can be shown by running

$ java -jar jfiredump-VERSION.jar --help
usage: jfiredump [<OPTIONS>] <FILE> {<TABLE>|!!all!!}
Available options:
 -e,--encoding <arg>       specify database encoding (firebird encoding names, see
                           https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/wiki/Character-encodings
                           )
 -h,--host <arg>           specify database host (default: localhost)
    --help                 print this message
 -l,--line-endings <arg>   either LF or CRLF
 -o,--out-location <arg>   specify output location (default for single tables:
                           '<datetime><table>.sql', default for all tables: '<datetime>
                           jfiredump')
 -p,--password <arg>       specify database password (default: masterkey)
    --port <arg>           specify database port (default: 3050)
 -r,--run-file <arg>       run an existing .sql-File (only allows INSERT statements). When
                           using this option, the positional <TABLE> argument is ignored.
                           Will only commit when all statements were processed without
                           errors.
 -u,--user <arg>           specify database user (default: SYSDBA)
 -v,--verbose              verbose logging output for debugging
 -vv,--very-verbose        very verbose logging output for debugging

Examples

Exporting all tables in a database

$ java -jar jfiredump-VERSION.jar --line-endings CRLF --encoding WIN1252 \
  -p myPassword --port 3055 MY_DB.GDB !!all!!

Exporting one table in a database

$ java -jar jfiredump-VERSION.jar --out-location table.sql MY_DB.GDB MY_TABLE

Running an existing dump file

$ java -jar jfiredump-VERSION.jar --run-file table.sql MY_DB.GDB

Development

Building

mvn clean compile assembly:single will put a jar file into the /target directory.

Developing in eclipse

Maven apparently comes with an eclipse plugin. All you need to do is run mvn eclipse:eclipse and then import the folder as an existing maven project.

dominiksta / jfiredump