Convert Excel to MariaDB

Upload a .xlsx or .xls file and get back a MariaDB 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 MariaDB

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

Your dataMariaDB type
Whole numberBIGINT
Decimal (money)DECIMAL(10,2)
Floating pointDOUBLE
True / falseTINYINT(1)
DateDATE
Date and timeDATETIME
Short textVARCHAR(255)
Long textLONGTEXT
Binary dataLONGBLOB

Working from an Excel file

"Excel" covers two entirely different file formats, and which one you have decides how much type information survives the conversion. It is worth checking what your workbook was actually saved as before you upload it.

  • Only .xls and .xlsx are recognised. A macro-enabled .xlsm, or a workbook saved as OpenDocument .ods, is refused before anything is read - save a copy as .xlsx first.
  • The two extensions take different code paths inside the reader: .xlsx through openpyxl, .xls through pandas and xlrd, and they do not recover the same amount of information from the file.
  • Sheet names become table names with every character outside letters, digits and underscores replaced one for one, so "Q1 Sales (2024)" arrives as Q1_Sales__2024: the space and the opening bracket each leave an underscore behind, and the trailing one is trimmed.

What MariaDB gets, and how it differs

MariaDB and MySQL are close enough here that one dialect serves both, and picking MariaDB does not select a different code path: the script is byte for byte the one a MySQL conversion produces. The differences worth flagging are in what you do with it.

  • The README packed beside the script names both engines in its load command, because the invocation is the same either way - the file is piped into a client rather than executed by the server.
  • The CREATE DATABASE line in that README asks for utf8mb4_unicode_ci and not for utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci, which is MySQL 8's default. MariaDB has never implemented the 0900 collations, and unicode_ci is the one both engines have.
  • Date-and-time columns are declared DATETIME rather than TIMESTAMP, so what loads is the wall-clock value the source held. No session time zone is applied on the way in, and none is applied when you read it back out.

Reading Excel

  • Numbers, dates and booleans are read as Excel stored them, never converted to text and re-parsed.
  • Cell number formats are read out of .xlsx workbooks, so a column formatted as currency becomes a fixed-point decimal rather than a floating-point number — which is how money avoids acquiring a rounding tail. Legacy .xls is the exception: the xlrd path exposes no formats, so its currency columns come across as ordinary numbers.
  • A column formatted as a date becomes a date, not a timestamp at midnight; one formatted with a time keeps its time.
  • One sheet becomes one table. Empty sheets are skipped, and sheet names are sanitised for the target.

Writing MariaDB

  • 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 Excel to MariaDB 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 Excel data keep its types in MariaDB?
Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real MariaDB 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.

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