README

Fbexport tool is a thin wrapper for fbexport, which is a program that exports and imports data from Firebird databases. The aim is to simplify the use of fbexport to extract a selection of tables in csv format.

Requirements

There is only one required program,

• fbexport

which is called to backup a database. If you want to build the documentation then the following python packages are necessary.

• mkdocs
• mkdocstrings
• mkdocs-material

Dependencies are handled by poetry, in adition, I use pytest for testing, but this is only a commodity as all testing is done by doctest.

Installation

Running

poetry install --no-root

should install a script fbexport-tool in your current virtual envirnoment.

Usage

First, make sure fbexport is installed somewhere in your path.

The input to this program is a firebird database and a text file whose content is a list of space separated names of the tables to be exported from the database. Alternatively,
you can pass the table names as extra arguments to the command. Note that it is possible to mix both the file and the list of names in the same calling to the program.

Example

Given the following content in the current directory

database.fbd
tables.txt

where the content of tables.txt is

TABLE1
TABLE2
"SOME OTHER TABLE"

then calling

fbexport-tool databse.fbd --tables tables.txt

will result in a new directory named YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-database where YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS is the system timestamp when the program was invoked and whose content consists of three csv files

YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-database
|
|-- table1.csv
|-- table2.csv
|-- some_other_table.csv

with the data of each table backed up.