Is converting dBase to Postgres 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 Postgres?

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

Upload a .dbf file and get back a Postgres 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 Postgres

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

Your data	Postgres 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 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.

The oldest PostgreSQL this loads into

Postgres is the informal spelling and the one most people type. Since the name says nothing about a version, the useful question for this page is which server releases the generated script runs on, and that is decided by the newest piece of syntax in it.

→The identity clause on auto-increment columns is the newest thing in the file, and it arrived in release 10. That is the floor for loading the script unedited.
→Everything else is far older: the hex escape the script uses for binary values has been accepted since 9.0, and jsonb, which is what a JSON column is declared as, since 9.4.
→On a server below the floor the script still loads if you delete the identity clauses by hand. The columns keep every value they were given, because each INSERT names them explicitly; they simply stop assigning new ones.

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 Postgres

→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 dBase to Postgres 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 Postgres?: Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real Postgres 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.