Convert JSONL to psql

Upload a .json or .ndjson 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.

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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 .jsonl file

JSON Lines and NDJSON are the same format under two names, and .jsonl is the spelling used by jq pipelines, Spark and machine-learning tooling. The content converts identically; only the file name causes trouble.

  • The .jsonl extension is not one the uploader recognises. Rename the file to .ndjson or .json - nothing inside it has to change.
  • Tools that write JSON Lines usually emit a directory of shards, part-00000.jsonl and so on. Only one convertible file per upload is accepted, and with no enclosing array to merge, cat part-*.jsonl > all.ndjson is the whole job.
  • Relaxed JSON is not JSON: trailing commas, single quotes and unquoted keys fail to parse, which is what a file written in a JSON5-ish mode will do. Running it through jq normalises it.

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 JSONL

  • JSON types are trusted: 1 and "1" stay different things.
  • Numbers with a decimal point are read as exact decimals rather than floats.
  • Both an array of objects and newline-delimited JSON work, and a wrapped array like {"data": [...]} is unwrapped automatically.
  • Nested objects are kept as JSON rather than flattened into invented column names.

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 JSONL 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 JSONL 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 JSONL to something else

Convert something else to psql