1Loading dBase files with pgloader
2---------------------------------
3
4The dBase format is still in use in some places as modern tools such as
5*Filemaker* and *Excel* offer some level of support for it. Speaking of
6support in modern tools, pgloader is right there on the list too!
7
8The Command
9^^^^^^^^^^^
10
11To load data with pgloader you need to define in a *command* the operations in
12some details. Here's our example for loading a dBase file, using a file
13provided by the french administration.
14
15You can find more files from them at the `Insee
16<http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/nomenclatures/cog/telechargement.asp>`_
17website.
18
19Here's our command::
20
21    LOAD DBF
22        FROM http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/nomenclatures/cog/telechargement/2013/dbf/historiq2013.zip
23        INTO postgresql:///pgloader
24        WITH truncate, create table
25         SET client_encoding TO 'latin1';
26
27Note that here pgloader will benefit from the meta-data information found in
28the dBase file to create a PostgreSQL table capable of hosting the data as
29described, then load the data.
30
31Loading the data
32^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
33
34Let's start the `pgloader` command with our `dbf-zip.load` command file::
35
36    $ pgloader dbf-zip.load
37    ... LOG Starting pgloader, log system is ready.
38    ... LOG Parsing commands from file "/Users/dim/dev/pgloader/test/dbf-zip.load"
39    ... LOG Fetching 'http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/nomenclatures/cog/telechargement/2013/dbf/historiq2013.zip'
40    ... LOG Extracting files from archive '//private/var/folders/w7/9n8v8pw54t1gngfff0lj16040000gn/T/pgloader//historiq2013.zip'
41
42           table name       read   imported     errors            time
43    -----------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
44             download          0          0          0          0.167s
45              extract          0          0          0          1.010s
46     create, truncate          0          0          0          0.071s
47    -----------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
48         historiq2013       9181       9181          0          0.658s
49    -----------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
50    Total import time       9181       9181          0          1.906s
51
52We can see that `pgloader <http://pgloader.io>`_ did download the file from
53its HTTP URL location then *unziped* it before the loading itself.
54
55Note that the output of the command has been edited to facilitate its
56browsing online.
57