Firebird Database Backup by Serialized Database Table Dump

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple utility for Firebird databases that allows for table-level backup and restore using serialization, providing an alternative to standard backup methods with enhanced resilience and recovery options.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel utility that enables table-specific backup and restore in Firebird databases using serialization, improving flexibility and robustness over existing tools.

Findings

Supports backup and restore of individual tables

Produces text-coded backups for increased resilience

Facilitates recovery of corrupted databases

Abstract

This paper presents a simple data dump and load utility for Firebird databases which mimics mysqldump in MySQL. This utility, fb_dump and fb_load, for dumping and loading respectively, retrieves each database table using kinterbasdb and serializes the data using marshal module. This utility has two advantages over the standard Firebird database backup utility, gbak. Firstly, it is able to backup and restore single database tables which might help to recover corrupted databases. Secondly, the output is in text-coded format (from marshal module) making it more resilient than a compressed text backup, as in the case of using gbak.