Firebird is a reliable and speedy RDBMS that supports numerous ANSI SQL standard features, and is free and open source. Nonetheless, Firebird lacks certain advanced capabilities required for building corporate-scale data warehouses, such as integrated replication and full-text search. As a result, many organizations migrate from Firebird to more sophisticated DBMSs, such as PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system that provides all possible features like subselects, transactions, user-defined types, and much more. It also has a comprehensive multi-level security system, either asynchronous or synchronous replication, and different approaches to indexing.
Migrating a Firebird database to PostgreSQL can be challenging, especially when it’s a large and complicated data warehouse. The process can be complicated and tedious and may lead to data loss or corruption when done manually due to human error. Additionally, these two DBMSs have a few nuances that distinguish them from each other, such as processing specific Firebird types like “blob sub_type 1,” different meanings of escaped strings inside SQL statements in Firebird and PostgreSQL, and converting Firebird auto-increment columns into PostgreSQL serial.
There are multiple options of automating and simplifying the Firebird to PostgreSQL migration. One free tool for exporting Firebird databases in CSV or SQL INSERT-statement form is FBexport. However, manual post-processing is required due to the different syntax of INSERT-statements in the source and destination DBMSs, and tables in the target database must be created manually because the tool only handles data migration.
There are also some commercial products that provide complete migration of Firebird databases to PostgreSQL with just a few clicks of a mouse button, such as the Firebird to PostgreSQL converter developed by Intelligent Converters, a software company that has been working in the field of database migration and synchronization since 2001.
The converter offers all the advanced features required for efficient conversion, including support for all versions of Firebird and PostgreSQL running on Windows and Linux/Unix platforms, conversion of table definitions, data, indexes, and constraints, an option to change the type, name, and attributes of any column of a table or exclude it from conversion, storage of conversion settings into a profile for the next run, an option to merge or sync Firebird data into an existing PostgreSQL database, full support for Unicode, an option to export Firebird databases into PostgreSQL scripts (when direct connection to PostgreSQL servers is not possible), and command-line support for scripting and scheduling the database migration. Installation of Firebird is not required.
Visit official site of Intelligent Converters to learn more about Firebird to PostgreSQL converter.