Features & philosophy

dbcrossbar is designed to do a few things well. Typically, dbcrossbar is used for loading raw data, and for moving data back and forth between production databases and data warehouses. It supports a few core features:

  1. Copying tables.
  2. Counting records in tables.
  3. Converting between different table schema formats, including PostgreSQL CREATE TABLE statements and BigQuery schema JSON.

dbcrossbar offers a number of handy features:

  • A single static binary on Linux, with no dependencies.
  • A stream-based architecture that limits the use of RAM and requires no temporary files.
  • Support for appending, overwriting or upserting into existing tables.
  • Support for selecting records using --where.

dbcrossbar also supports a rich variety of portable column types:

  • Common types, including booleans, dates, timestamps, floats, integers, and text.
  • UUIDs.
  • JSON.
  • GeoJSON.
  • Arrays.

Non-features

The following features are explicitly excluded from dbcrossbar's mission:

  • Data cleaning and transformation.
  • Fixing invalid column names.
  • Copying multiple tables at time.
  • Automatically copying constraints, foreign keys, etc.

If you need these features, then take a look at tools like scrubcsv and pgloader.