ASA Database Administration Guide
Database Administration Utilities
With the Unload utility, you can unload a database and put a set of data files in a named directory. The Unload utility creates an Interactive SQL command file to rebuild your database. It also unloads all of the data in each of your tables, into files in the specified directory in comma-delimited format. Binary data is properly represented with escape sequences.
You can also use the Unload utility to directly create a new database from an existing one. This avoids potential security problems with the database contents being written to ordinary disk files.
You can access the Unload utility in the following ways:
From Sybase Central, using the Unload Database wizard.
At the command prompt, using the dbunload command. This is useful for incorporating into batch or command files.
The Unload utility should be run from a user ID with DBA authority. This is the only way you can be sure of having the necessary privileges to unload all the data. In addition, the reload.sql file should be run from the DBA user ID. (Usually, it will be run on a new database where the only user ID is DBA with password SQL.)
The database server -gl option controls the permissions required to unload data from the database. For information, see -gl server option.
The dbo user ID owns a set of Adaptive Server Enterprise-compatible system objects in a database.
The Unload utility does not unload the objects that were created for the dbo user ID during database creation. Changes made to these objects, such as redefining a system procedure, are lost when the data is unloaded. Any objects that were created by the dbo user ID since the initialization of the database are unloaded by the Unload utility, and so these objects are preserved.
There are special considerations for unloading databases involved in replication.
For information, see Unloading and reloading a database participating in replication.
Unloading a database using the Unload Database wizard utility
Unloading a database using the dbunload command-line utility