ext-table-gen: Firebird External Table Generator

The “Firebird External Table Generator” or ext-table-gen is a commandline tool to convert RFC 4180 CSV files and CSV files with custom formats to Firebird external tables (a binary format for Firebird external table data).

External tables are a good way for bulk-loading data into Firebird. Unfortunately, external tables use a fixed-width binary format^[1], and not a (more) standard format like CSV. It is not always easy to create an appropriate external table file, and this is where ext-table-gen can be used.

At a high level, ext-table-gen provides the following features:

• Derive a CHAR-based external table definition (i.e. a CREATE TABLE statement and a configuration for ext-table-gen) from a CSV file

• Transform a CSV file to an external table file (either based on the CSV file itself, or based on a configuration file)

By default, ext-table-gen derives tables with only CHAR columns. This makes the generated file essentially a fixed-width text format. However, you can modify the configuration file to make ext-table-gen generate columns of different types, in which case the file becomes a binary format. ext-table-gen supports the following types of columns:

• String types:

  • char

• Integral number types:

  • smallint

  • integer

  • bigint

  • int128

• Exact numeric types (fixed point):

  • numeric

  • decimal

• Datetime types:

  • date

  • time (without time zone)

  • timestamp (without time zone)

The project is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/mrotteveel/ext-table-gen.

Documentation

Documentation of the latest tagged release can be found on: https://mrotteveel.github.io/ext-table-gen/

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

---

1. The format is essentially the in-memory layout of rows which Firebird also uses internally