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Command Line

To perform batch conversion or call conversion procedure from an automation script you can use console version of DBF to SQL Server converter called D2MAGENT.EXE. Find this file in the installation folder. You can either run this tool directly from command line or call it from any script as well. The program supports the following command-line options:

--dest=...   MS SQL database name
--encoding=...   decode all text fields using DBase codepage specified (see the table below)
--help   display help message and exit
--log2int   convert DBase logical fields into MS SQL TINYINT(1) according to ANSI standard (true=1, false=0)
--logfile=...   path to the logfile where execution traces will be written
--mode=...   how to process an existing MS SQL database (0 - overwrite the entire database, 1 - overwrite existing tables only, 2 - skip existing tables, 3 - merge)
--mssqlh=...   MS SQL server IP address or network name
--mssqlu=...   MS SQL user name
--mssqlp=...   MS SQL user password
--profile=...   path to a profile to load conversion settings from
--silent   use this option to disable program output
--skip_del   don't convert records marked as deleted
--src=...   path to DBF database
--tab_def   convert table definitions only
--tab_file=...   file containing table names to convert (one table name per line)

In the following example the program converts DBF database located in "c:\db 1" folder into MS SQL database "db 1" on MS SQL server "mssqlhost":

D2MAGENT.EXE --src="c:\db 1" --dest="db 1" --mssqlh=mssqlhost

Notes:

  1. You can omit 'mssqlh' to connect local database server
  2. You can omit 'mssqlu' and 'mssqlp' parameters to connect to MS SQL server using Windows authentication
  3. If you omit 'tab_file' parameter, all DBF files from the specified folder will be converted
  4. Command line parameters that contain spaces should be enclosed in quotes (for example --dest="my database")

DBase Codepages

Usually code page is stored in the header of .dbf file and extracted by converter automatically. But if it is not happened, you may specify code page manually via '--encoding=...' command line parameter. Below is the list of acceptable values:

0   Use default encoding (from header of .dbf file)
1   U.S. MS-DOS
2   International MS-DOS
3   Windows ANSI
4   Standard Macintosh
38   866 DOS Russian
87   1251 Windows ANSI
100   Eastern European MS-DOS
101   Russian MS-DOS
102   Nordic MS-DOS
103   Icelandic MS-DOS
104   Kamenicky (Czech) MS-DOS
105   Mazovia (Polish) MS-DOS
106   Greek MS-DOS (437G)
107   Turkish MS-DOS
150   Russian Macintosh
151   Eastern European Macintosh
152   Greek Macintosh
200   Eastern European Windows
201   Russian Windows
202   Turkish Windows
203   Greek Windows