Importing and Exporting Data across Firebird Databases

In the past couple of weeks, I've encountered a few problems with the Firebird databases that I maintain.  In both cases, I had to retrieve data from a backup and restore it to the one running in production.

Firebird does not come with any built-in utility to do that function.  Thankfully, as with majority of open source projects, there are 3rd party solutions that seem to do what you want.  In this case, I found FBExport:

http://fbexport.sourceforge.net/

The command-line syntax is very straightforward.  First, you extract:

fbexport -S -H hostname -D database1.gdb -U username -P password -F file.fbx -Q "select * from sometable"

Then, you import:

fbexport -I -H hostname -D database2.gdb -U username -P password -F file.fbx -Q "INSERT INTO sometable(field1, field2, field3)"

It works great!