Convert MDB to SQLite
Upload a .mdb or .accdb or .mde file and get back a SQLite file. 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 SQLite
Generated from the converter's own SQLite type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | SQLite type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | BIGINT |
| Decimal (money) | NUMERIC(10,2) |
| Floating point | REAL |
| True / false | BOOLEAN |
| Date | DATE |
| Date and time | TIMESTAMP |
| Short text | TEXT |
| Long text | TEXT |
| Binary data | BLOB |
Working from an .mdb file
An .mdb file is Jet 4, the engine Access used up to 2003. It is the format most likely to be sitting on a share drive with no copy of Access left in the building to open it - which is the situation this converter exists for.
- →Jet 4 caps a database at 2 GB and a table at 255 columns, which is why an .mdb that has outgrown its purpose is usually a migration rather than a rewrite.
- →There is no companion file to hunt for. A .ldb sitting beside the database is only a lock file from whoever last had it open, and nothing in it is needed - upload the .mdb on its own.
- →Every table is read into memory in one pass before anything is written out, which is affordable only because the free upload is capped at 10 MB; a full-size Jet database would not be.
What the .sqlite file looks like inside
The output here is a real database rather than a script, so the interesting question is not how to load it but what SQLite did with the types on the way in. Its storage classes are looser than the declarations the file ends up carrying.
- →Names are carried over exactly as they were, with none of the sanitising the script targets apply: a table called Sales Report keeps its space and a column called Order ID keeps its own, so your queries have to quote them.
- →Underneath the declared types sit only five storage classes, and NUMERIC affinity - what a decimal column gets - is the loosest of them: it normalises inserted text to whatever a plain INTEGER or REAL column would hold. The precision and scale in the schema are for a human reading it, not a guarantee SQLite enforces on the bytes; the Writing notes below cover what that means for money specifically.
- →Declared type and stored type are different things here: a BOOLEAN column holds the integers 1 and 0, and a DATE column holds ISO text, because those are the storage classes SQLite actually has. Every client reads them back the same way.
Reading MDB
- →Dates are exported in ISO form, avoiding the ambiguous 12/02/21 that Access tools produce by default.
- →NULL and the empty string stay distinct.
- →Access can hold dates outside the range it can represent. Those become NULL and the conversion tells you, rather than dropping them silently.
- →Requires mdbtools on the server; if it is unavailable you get a clear error rather than a partial conversion.
Writing SQLite
- →Columns get real declared types rather than everything being TEXT.
- →Primary keys and NOT NULL constraints are preserved.
- →A money column is declared NUMERIC(10,2), but that declaration does not stop SQLite’s own numeric affinity from converting the inserted value into a float once it lands, so 19.99 can come back with a rounding tail. Pick the DuckDB target instead when the exact decimal has to survive.
What you get
A ZIP containing database.sqlite. If anything about your data needed a judgement call, a _warnings.txt explains it.
Questions
- Is converting MDB to SQLite 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 MDB data keep its types in SQLite?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real SQLite 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.