Is converting dBase to MySQL 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 dBase data keep its types in MySQL?

Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real MySQL 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.

Convert dBase to MySQL

Upload a .dbf file and get back a MySQL SQL script you can load straight into your database. Types are preserved rather than flattened to text. Free, no registration, up to 10MB.

1Upload your file

Click to upload or drag and drop

CSV, Excel, SQLite, SQL, DBF (max 10 MB)

2Choose target format

How your data is typed in MySQL

Generated from the converter's own MySQL type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.

Your data	MySQL type
Whole number	BIGINT
Decimal (money)	DECIMAL(10,2)
Floating point	DOUBLE
True / false	TINYINT(1)
Date	DATE
Date and time	DATETIME
Short text	VARCHAR(255)
Long text	LONGTEXT
Binary data	LONGBLOB

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.

Loading the dump into MySQL

The download is a plain SQL script, so nothing in it depends on how you connect: the same file goes in through the command-line client, through a GUI import dialog or through phpMyAdmin. What is worth reading first is the handful of statements it runs before it creates anything.

→Before the first CREATE TABLE the script issues SET NAMES utf8mb4, so the session decodes the file as UTF-8 whatever the client's own default character set is. The file itself carries no marker saying so.
→The line after it turns FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS off. That is there for the schema you are loading into, not for the script: it lets rows arrive in whatever order the tables came out of the source without a constraint that already exists rejecting them.
→A true/false column is declared TINYINT(1) and its values are written as 1 and 0. MySQL's own BOOLEAN keyword expands to exactly that, so a client that does not special-case the width shows you a number rather than a boolean.

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 MySQL

→Tables are created as InnoDB with utf8mb4, so emoji and CJK text survive the load.
→Backslashes are escaped, because MySQL treats them as escape characters by default.
→Text columns of unknown length become TEXT rather than a guessed VARCHAR that could truncate your data.
→Inserts are batched, and identifiers are capped at MySQL’s 64-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 MySQL or MariaDB:

  mysql -u USER -p DATABASE < dump.sql

Create the database first if it does not exist:

  mysql -u USER -p -e "CREATE DATABASE DATABASE CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;"

Questions

Is converting dBase to MySQL 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 dBase data keep its types in MySQL?: Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real MySQL 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.