Is converting DBF to Microsoft SQL Server 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 DBF data keep its types in Microsoft SQL Server?

Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real Microsoft SQL Server 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 DBF to Microsoft SQL Server

Upload a .dbf file and get back a Microsoft SQL Server 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 Microsoft SQL Server

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

Your data	Microsoft SQL Server type
Whole number	BIGINT
Decimal (money)	DECIMAL(10,2)
Floating point	FLOAT
True / false	BIT
Date	DATE
Date and time	DATETIME2
Short text	NVARCHAR(255)
Long text	NVARCHAR(MAX)
Binary data	VARBINARY(MAX)

Working from a .dbf file

A .dbf holds one table and describes its own fields in a header, so none of the structure has to be guessed. What it does not always hold is all of its data: long text lives in a second file beside it.

→The header is inspected before conversion, and if it declares a memo field with no companion file present the upload is refused with that companion's exact name - CUSTOMER.fpt, not "a memo file".
→That name is derived from your file's own stem plus the version byte in its header, and the check is case-insensitive because DOS-era files usually arrive in upper case.
→Upload the .dbf and its companion together in one request. Several files are accepted at once, and the 10 MB free limit applies to the total rather than to each file.

Which SQL Server this runs on

Microsoft SQL Server is the full product name, and it covers a wide range of places to put a database: Express on a laptop, a Developer instance, a Linux container, a managed Azure SQL database. The script was written not to care which of them it lands in.

→There is no CREATE DATABASE, no USE, and no filegroup or collation clause anywhere in the file, so nothing in it can be refused by an edition that forbids those. Which database it populates is decided by your client's connection.
→No schema is named either, so the tables land in the default schema of whichever login runs the script - dbo for most logins. Moving them elsewhere afterwards is an ALTER SCHEMA ... TRANSFER.
→The primary key is emitted as an unnamed constraint, which the server materialises as a clustered index under a name it invents. Nothing else is indexed, so any index the source carried has to be rebuilt by hand.

Reading DBF

→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 Microsoft 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.

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 SQL Server:

  sqlcmd -S HOST -U USER -P PASSWORD -d DATABASE -i dump.sql

Notes:

  - Text columns are NVARCHAR and literals carry the N prefix, so
    non-ASCII data survives regardless of database collation.
  - Timestamps are DATETIME2. T-SQL's TIMESTAMP type is a row
    version, not a point in time.

Questions

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