Convert Microsoft Access to MySQL

Upload a .mdb or .accdb or .mde file and get back a MySQL 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 MySQL

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

Your dataMySQL 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 a Microsoft Access database

The reason people search for this one is usually not the file, it is the software. Converting here needs no copy of Microsoft Access, no Office licence and no Windows machine anywhere in the process.

  • Reading happens on the server through the mdbtools utilities, so the ACE and Jet ODBC drivers are never involved: no "provider is not registered on the local machine", and no 32-bit versus 64-bit driver mismatch.
  • You do not need Access at your end to check the result either. The preview lists the tables, columns and detected types before you download anything.
  • Nothing is installed or run on your own machine, and the server's temporary copy of your database is deleted as soon as the download has been sent.

Loading the dump into MySQL

The download is a plain SQL script, so nothing in it depends on how you connect: the same file goes in through the command-line client, through a GUI import dialog or through phpMyAdmin. What is worth reading first is the handful of statements it runs before it creates anything.

  • Before the first CREATE TABLE the script issues SET NAMES utf8mb4, so the session decodes the file as UTF-8 whatever the client's own default character set is. The file itself carries no marker saying so.
  • The line after it turns FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS off. That is there for the schema you are loading into, not for the script: it lets rows arrive in whatever order the tables came out of the source without a constraint that already exists rejecting them.
  • A true/false column is declared TINYINT(1) and its values are written as 1 and 0. MySQL's own BOOLEAN keyword expands to exactly that, so a client that does not special-case the width shows you a number rather than a boolean.

Reading Microsoft Access

  • 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 MySQL

  • 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 Microsoft Access to MySQL 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 Microsoft Access data keep its types in MySQL?
Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real MySQL 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 Microsoft Access to something else

Convert something else to MySQL