Convert DB file to psql
Upload a .sqlite or .db or .sqlite3 file and get back a psql SQL script you can load straight into your database. Types are preserved rather than flattened to text. Free, no registration, up to 10MB.
Click to upload or drag and drop
CSV, Excel, SQLite, SQL, DBF (max 10 MB)
How your data is typed in psql
Generated from the converter's own psql type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | psql type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | BIGINT |
| Decimal (money) | NUMERIC(10,2) |
| Floating point | DOUBLE PRECISION |
| True / false | BOOLEAN |
| Date | DATE |
| Date and time | TIMESTAMP |
| Short text | TEXT |
| Long text | TEXT |
| Binary data | BYTEA |
Working from a .db file
A .db extension is a habit rather than a format. SQLite uses it, but so do Berkeley DB, thumbnail caches and any desktop application that wanted a generic name, so the first question is what is actually inside yours.
- →A .db is routed to the SQLite reader on its extension alone, so one that is not a SQLite database fails to open rather than converting into something wrong.
- →You can check first: a SQLite file begins with the text "SQLite format 3" in its first 16 bytes, which head -c 16 yourfile.db will show you.
- →DuckDB databases are often saved as .db too, and that one will not open here - rename it to .duckdb or .ddb so it reaches the DuckDB reader instead.
Running the script through psql
psql is PostgreSQL's command-line client rather than the database itself, and the script is written to be fed straight into it. Everything here is about the tool you run, not about the server you run it against.
- →From inside a session already open, \i dump.sql runs the file without leaving the prompt. The script contains no backslash meta-commands of its own, so nothing in it can collide with yours.
- →There is no BEGIN and no COMMIT anywhere in the file. Statements commit as they go, so a failure halfway leaves the tables already created: pass -1 to wrap the whole load in a single transaction, or -v ON_ERROR_STOP=1 to stop at the first error instead of carrying on past it.
- →The script switches standard_conforming_strings on itself instead of trusting the server default, so it behaves identically against a session that has been moved off it.
- →It sets client_encoding to UTF8 for the same reason. The file is written as UTF-8 with nothing to announce that, and psql would otherwise decode it using whatever the client locale says.
Reading DB file
- →Declared types, primary keys, NOT NULL constraints and blobs all carry through.
- →SQLite reports INTEGER PRIMARY KEY as nullable because it aliases the rowid; the conversion corrects that.
- →SQLite type affinity is loose, so a NUMERIC column with no declared scale is given room for decimals rather than being rounded to whole numbers.
Writing psql
- →Backslashes are left alone, because PostgreSQL treats them as ordinary characters — doubling them would corrupt every Windows path.
- →Auto-increment columns become GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY.
- →Binary data is written as bytea, and identifiers respect the 63-character limit.
What you get
A ZIP containing dump.sql, plus a README with the exact command to load it. If anything about your data needed a judgement call, a _warnings.txt explains it.
Load this dump into PostgreSQL: psql -U USER -d DATABASE -f dump.sql Create the database first if it does not exist: createdb -U USER DATABASE
Questions
- Is converting DB file to psql free?
- Yes. Files up to 10MB convert free with no account. There is a limit of five conversions per day per IP address.
- Will my DB file data keep its types in psql?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real psql types rather than everything becoming text. The mapping table above shows exactly what you get.
- Do you store my file?
- No. The file is written to a temporary directory, converted, and the directory is deleted as soon as your download has been sent.