Convert dBase to SQL Server

Working from a dBase file

dBase III and IV gave the format its five original field types, and that small vocabulary is why a dBase table converts so cleanly: there is very little in one that a modern database cannot hold exactly.

• →Character, Numeric, Date, Logical and Memo are the whole type system. A Numeric field declared with no decimals becomes a 64-bit integer; one with decimals becomes an exact decimal of the declared width and scale.
• →dBase has no time-of-day type at all, so a Date field converts to a pure date and never to a timestamp at midnight.
• →dBase IV memo blocks carry an 8-byte header and dBase III's do not, so a .dbt written by either generation is read with the block layout it actually uses.

How names and bytes are written

mssql is the short name the drivers use - the ODBC DSN, SQLAlchemy's mssql+pyodbc, the container image. What it produces is ordinary T-SQL text, and the details worth checking before you run it are how it writes names and how it writes raw bytes.

• →Identifiers are wrapped in square brackets rather than double quotes, and a bracket inside a source name is turned into an underscore before the wrapping goes on: a column named Order]Date is created as [Order_Date], so a bracket in your data can never close a name early.
• →The identifier cap is 128 characters, high enough that almost every source name survives untouched - one that Oracle would have to cut at 30 arrives here whole.
• →Binary columns are VARBINARY(MAX) and their values are written as bare 0x hex literals, with no quotes around them and no conversion function wrapped over them.

Reading dBase

• →Numeric fields with decimals are read as exact decimals, not floats, so currency does not drift.
• →Character field widths are read from the header and carried into the target.
• →The code page declared in the file header is used, so Cyrillic, Western European and other legacy DOS encodings decode correctly instead of turning into mojibake. 157 code pages are recognised.
• →Files written by dBase III or Clipper declare no code page at all — the header byte for it did not exist yet. For those, the most plausible encoding is chosen by inspecting the text, and the conversion tells you it had to guess. The API takes a sourceEncoding parameter (e.g. cp866) to force it instead of guessing, though the widget above does not have a control for it yet.
• →Memo columns keep their text in a separate .dbt or .fpt file. If the .dbf declares one and it was not uploaded, the conversion stops and tells you which file to add, rather than handing you a table whose long text is silently blank.

Writing SQL Server

• →String literals carry the N prefix, so non-ASCII text survives whatever collation the database uses.
• →Timestamps become DATETIME2. T-SQL’s TIMESTAMP is a row-version counter, not a point in time.
• →Identity columns are wrapped in SET IDENTITY_INSERT so explicit key values load.
• →Statements are separated with GO in batches.

Convert dBase to something else

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle
• SQLite
• DuckDB
• CSV
• Excel

Convert something else to SQL Server

• CSV
• Excel
• SQLite
• SQL dump
• JSON
• XML
• Parquet
• DuckDB
• MS Access
• PostgreSQL backup