Is the table prebuilt on the $dest DB? Any concerns with encoding? Differing data types? Large amounts of space?

If not, why not something as simple as:

1. start transaction on $dest
2. Start cursor on $source (select * from source_table)
3. delete data on $dest (delete from backup_table)
4. insert each row from $source to $dest (get from $source, save to $dest)
5. end transaction on $dest

This won't be terribly fast if it is a large table. There may also be better tools for this (export to a CSV, import from CSV, for example, given the right format of the data).

Are there any special constraints on your problem that stop you from using the straightforward solution?

We are giving the client the option to merge (but not add) some data into the database

We want to take a snapshot of the table premerge, if they discover something is awry (sometimes days and several updates later) we want the premerge data. Some of our clients have 100,000+ records in each of 5-6 tables. Encoding and such isn't an issue, we just support various DB platforms, so I was hoping there was a module that let me do something like a $dbh->backup($mytable_name, $myholding_file); & a $dbh->restore($myholding_file, $mytable_name); (and yes I know if updates have been made we may need to do more, but this would be enough 75% of the time)

g_White

And the export/import to/from CSV or XML or SQL would work, just looking to see if there was a cross platform tool that did this amongst some of the cryptic DBIx module names....

g_White