Export a Firebird database to CSV or Excel

fbrescue writes every table of a Firebird 2.5–5.0 database to its own CSV file, straight from the database file: no server, no ODBC driver, no password. Download the binary for your system from Releases, then:

fbrescue export shop.fdb --out data

data/
  schema.sql        CREATE TABLE statements
  CUSTOMERS.csv     one file per table
  ORDERS.csv
  _errors.jsonl     only if some rows could not be read

Use --table NAME (repeatable) for some tables only. Make a copy of the file first if a server is using it: a file copied while the server writes to it can be inconsistent.

What the CSV looks like

• RFC 4180: comma-separated, a header row with the column names, UTF-8, values quoted when needed.
• NULL is an empty field, an empty string is "", so the two stay apart.
• Numbers are exact: NUMERIC(18,2) comes out as 1234.50, never as a float.
• Dates 2024-02-29, times 13:45:00.0000, timestamps 2024-02-29 13:45:00.0000; booleans true / false.
• Text BLOBs are written in full; binary values as hexadecimal.
• Text in CHARACTER SET NONE: add --charset WIN1251 (or the encoding the program used) to get readable UTF-8.

Open in Excel

Double-clicking a CSV makes Excel guess the encoding and the separator, which breaks non-English text and, in some countries, the columns. Instead: Data → From Text/CSV, choose the file, set File origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) and Delimiter to Comma, then Load. LibreOffice Calc asks the same in its import dialog.

Other formats

• --format jsonl: one JSON object per row, exact numbers as JSON numbers — easiest for Python, Node or jq.
• --format sql: INSERT statements and schema.sql, to load into another Firebird database with isql.

Moving to another database: Firebird to PostgreSQL. File will not open, or the export reports errors: recovering a corrupted database.