Unformatted Copying
To copy all rows of a table to a file with no conversion or formatting, omit the column list from the COPY statement. This operation is referred to as an unformatted copy.
For example, to copy the entire employee table into the file, emp_name, issue the following statement:
COPY TABLE employee () INTO 'emp_name';
Parentheses must be included in the statement, even though no columns are listed. The resulting binary file contains data stored in column binary formats. To load data from a file that was created by an unformatted COPY INTO, use an unformatted COPY FROM.
Note: An unformatted copy (whether using COPY, copydb, or unloaddb) is not portable across platforms due to the endianness of the binary data. For example, if you unload data in binary format on Linux x86-64, you cannot reload it on a system that is running HP-UX Itanium. On VMS, unformatted COPY INTO always creates a VMS binary file.
Last modified date: 11/28/2023