Convert DuckDB to psql

Upload a .duckdb or .ddb 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 datapsql type
Whole numberBIGINT
Decimal (money)NUMERIC(10,2)
Floating pointDOUBLE PRECISION
True / falseBOOLEAN
DateDATE
Date and timeTIMESTAMP
Short textTEXT
Long textTEXT
Binary dataBYTEA

Working from a .duckdb file

DuckDB keeps an entire analytical database in one file, with real types behind it - decimals that are decimals, and integers wide enough to be worth checking before you move them somewhere narrower.

  • Only the main schema is read. Tables created in another schema, or in a second database attached at query time, are not part of the conversion.
  • Views in main are read as though they were tables, so a view's rows are materialised into the target rather than skipped.
  • HUGEINT is the one type with nowhere to go: no target here has a 128-bit integer, so those columns are carried across as text rather than silently truncated.
  • A DuckDB process that was killed leaves a .duckdb.wal sidecar holding everything it had not checkpointed yet. Upload the database on its own and it opens with no error and no tables at all - send the .wal file alongside it, or checkpoint before you copy the database out.

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 DuckDB

  • Types, primary keys and NOT NULL constraints are read from the database.
  • The file is opened read-only, so your upload is never modified or upgraded in place.

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 DuckDB 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 DuckDB 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.

This conversion, under other names

Convert DuckDB to something else

Convert something else to psql