NAME

       pgdbf - convert XBase / FoxPro tables to PostgreSQL

SYNOPSIS

       pgdbf [-cCdDeEhqQtTuU] [-m memofile] filename [indexcolumn ...]

DESCRIPTION

       PgDBF  is  a program for converting XBase databases - particularly FoxPro tables with memo files - into a
       format that PostgreSQL can directly import.  It's a compact C project with  no  dependencies  other  than
       standard Unix libraries. While the project is relatively tiny and simple, it's also heavily optimized via
       profiling - routine benchmark were many times faster than with other Open Source programs. In fact,  even
       on slower systems, conversions are typically limited by hard drive speed.

   Features
       PgDBF was designed with a few core principles:

              Simplicity.  This code should be understandable by anyone who wants to hack it.

              Robustness.  Every syscall that might possibly fail is checked for success.

              Speed.  PgDBF was born to be the fastest conversion available anywhere.

              Completeness.  It has full support for FoxPro memo files.

              Portability.  PgDBF runs on 32- and 64-bit systems, and both little-endian (eg x86) and big-endian
              (eg PowerPC) architectures.

   Performance
       PgDBF's speed is generally limited by how fast it can read your hard drives.  A  striped  RAID  of  quick
       disks  can  keep PgDBF pretty well fed on a single-processor system. One problem area is with memo files,
       which may become very internally fragmented as memo fields are created, deleted, and  updated.  For  best
       results,  consider  placing the DBF and FPT files on a RAM drive so that there's no seek penalty as there
       is with spinning hard drives, or using a filesystem such as ZFS that caches aggressively.

       One particularly fragmented 160MB table with memo fields used to take over three  minutes  on  a  FreeBSD
       UFS2 filesystem. Moving the files to a RAM disk dropped the conversion time to around 1.2 seconds.

       A  certain  test  table  used  during development comprises a 280MB DBF file and a 660MB memo file. PgDBF
       converts this to a 1.3 million row PostgreSQL table in about 11 seconds, or at a rate of  almost  120,000
       rows per second.

OPTIONS

       -c     Generate  a  CREATE TABLE statement to make a table with similar datatypes and column names as the
              DBF file. Default.

       -C     Suppress the CREATE TABLE statement.

       -d     Generate a DROP TABLE statement before the CREATE TABLE statement. This is  useful  for  replacing
              the contents of a table that already exists in PostgreSQL. Default.

       -D     Suppress the DROP TABLE statement.

       -e     Change  the  DROP  TABLE  statement  to  DROP TABLE IF EXISTS so that newer versions of PostgreSQL
              (8.2+) will only attempt to drop the table if it's already  defined.  PostgreSQL  will  return  an
              error when attempting to drop a table that does not exist unless IF EXISTS is used. Default.

       -E     Do  not  use  the  IF  EXISTS modifier to DROP TABLE for compatibility with versions of PostgreSQL
              older than 8.2.

       -h     Print a help message, then exit.

       -m memofile
              The name of the associated memo file (if necessary).

       -n     Create NUMERIC fields with type NUMERIC. Default.

       -N     Create NUMERIC fields with type TEXT. Use this if rows contain  invalid  number  data  in  NUMERIC
              fields (which are essentially CHARACTER fields behind the scenes).

       -p     Show a progress bar during the conversion process.

       -P     Do not show a progress bar. Default.

       -q     Enclose  the name of the table in quotation marks in statements like "CREATE TABLE", "DROP TABLE",
              and so on. This is useful in cases where the table name is a PostgreSQL reserved word, and  almost
              certainly harmless in all other cases.

       -Q     Do not enclose the name of the table in quotation marks. Default.

       -s encoding
              Set  the  encoding used in the input file. When given, output will be converted from that encoding
              to UTF-8. Supported encodings depend on your version of the iconv library. Available only if  your
              copy of PgDBF was compiled with iconv support.

       -t     Wrap the entire script in a transaction. Default.

       -T     Remove  the  wrapper  transaction.  This is generally not a good idea as it can cause the table to
              appear completely empty to other clients during the data copying  phase.  If  the  entire  process
              occurs  inside  a transaction, the update is atomic and other clients will have full access to all
              data in the table at all times.

       -u     Issue a TRUNCATE TABLE statement to clear the contents of a table before copying data into it.

       -U     Suppress the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Default.

OPTION NOTES

       The -c and -d arguments are incompatible with -u as it's pointless to  truncate  a  newly-created  table.
       Specifying  -c  or  -d will disable the TRUNCATE TABLE statement as though -U was given. Similarly, using
       the -u argument will disable the CREATE TABLE and DROP TABLE statements as if -C and -D were given.

BUGS

       When multiple incompatible interpretations of a type are available, such as the B  type  which  can  mean
       binary  object  in  dBASE  V  or  double-precision  float  in  FoxPro,  PgDBF  currently  uses the FoxPro
       interpretation.

       Most XBase datatypes are supported, but some are not (yet). As of this writing, PgDBF can handle boolean,
       currency, date, double-precision float, float, general (although only outputs empty strings; it's unclear
       how to resolve OLE objects at this time), integer, memo, numeric, timestamp, and varchar fields.  If  you
       need other datatypes, send a small sample database for testing.

AUTHOR

       Kirk Strauser <kirk@strauser.com>