Convert xBase to Oracle

Working from an xBase table

xBase is the family name for the record layout dBase defined and Clipper, FoxBase and FoxPro adopted. A file from any of them opens here; the differences live in the header bytes, and those are read rather than assumed.

• →Records deleted but never packed are still physically present, flagged with an asterisk. They are skipped, so the converted table holds the rows the application showed and not the ones it hid.
• →Clipper is the trap in this family: it wrote version byte 0x03 even for tables with memo columns, so a naive reader picks the wrong memo layout and dies with "unpack requires a buffer of 8 bytes". That case is handled here.
• →The header gives each field an 11-byte name slot, so xBase column names are at most 10 characters - a limit that follows the data into the target unless you rename the columns there.

Oracle-specific edges in the script

Oracle diverges further from ordinary SQL than any other target here, and the script is shaped around that. Three of its choices are worth reading before you load, because each is a place where the source can hold something Oracle has no room for.

• →Oracle's reserved list is full of words that legacy tables use as column names, so those get a trailing underscore: a column called DATE becomes DATE_, NUMBER becomes NUMBER_, LEVEL becomes LEVEL_.
• →Binary values are written as HEXTORAW('...'), which a plain SQL script can carry only up to 2000 hex characters - 1000 bytes. Anything larger needs PL/SQL chunking that no portable script can express, so a table of real attachments moves better through the SQLite or DuckDB target.
• →A string column of unknown length is declared VARCHAR2(4000) and anything longer becomes a CLOB. Under the default settings VARCHAR2 counts bytes rather than characters, so 4000 characters of Cyrillic or CJK will not fit in one.
• →Rows are batched a hundred to a statement, each block closed off with SELECT 1 FROM DUAL, so a 100,000-row table arrives as a thousand statements rather than a hundred thousand.

Reading xBase

• →Numeric fields with decimals are read as exact decimals, not floats, so currency does not drift.
• →Character field widths are read from the header and carried into the target.
• →The code page declared in the file header is used, so Cyrillic, Western European and other legacy DOS encodings decode correctly instead of turning into mojibake. 157 code pages are recognised.
• →Files written by dBase III or Clipper declare no code page at all — the header byte for it did not exist yet. For those, the most plausible encoding is chosen by inspecting the text, and the conversion tells you it had to guess. The API takes a sourceEncoding parameter (e.g. cp866) to force it instead of guessing, though the widget above does not have a control for it yet.
• →Memo columns keep their text in a separate .dbt or .fpt file. If the .dbf declares one and it was not uploaded, the conversion stops and tells you which file to add, rather than handing you a table whose long text is silently blank.

Writing Oracle

• →Uses INSERT ALL rather than multi-row VALUES, which Oracle rejects outright — the most common reason a generated Oracle script fails to load.
• →Dates are written with TO_DATE and an explicit format mask.
• →Booleans become NUMBER(1), because Oracle had no BOOLEAN column type before 23c.
• →Identifiers are capped at 30 characters so the script loads on Oracle 12.1 and earlier too.
• →Note that Oracle itself treats an empty string as NULL — that is Oracle behaviour, not a conversion error.

Convert xBase to something else

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server
• SQLite
• DuckDB
• CSV
• Excel

Convert something else to Oracle

• CSV
• Excel
• SQLite
• SQL dump
• JSON
• XML
• Parquet
• DuckDB
• MS Access
• PostgreSQL backup