PgDBF 0.5.5

PgDBF 0.5.5 comes as an effective and smart 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.

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.

Major Features:

1. Simplicity. This code should be understandable by anyone who wants to hack it.
2. Robustness. Every syscall is checked for success.
3. Speed. PgDBF was born to be the fastest conversion available anywhere.
4. Completeness. It has full support for FoxPro memo files.
5. Portability. PgDBF runs on 32- and 64-bit systems, and both little-endian (eg x86) and big-endian (eg PowerPC) architectures.