Convert Microsoft Access to PGSQL

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

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

Your dataPGSQL 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 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 into an application's database

PGSQL is the name PostgreSQL wears inside application code: PHP's pgsql extension, Laravel's pgsql connection driver, the pdo_pgsql DSN prefix. If that is where you met the name, the database you are loading into probably belongs to a framework, which changes what to watch for.

  • The script creates its own tables. Point it at a schema your migrations own and the next migration run and this file will disagree about who defines the table - load into an empty schema, or a database of its own, and point the application at that.
  • Because every identifier is double-quoted, the case the source used is the case that gets stored. A column that arrives as "CustomerID" has to be quoted in your queries too: an unquoted CustomerID folds to customerid and is not found.
  • No FOREIGN KEY, index or view statement is generated at all, so a framework that introspects the database finds unrelated tables. Declare the relations in your models, or add them with ALTER TABLE once the rows are in.

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 PGSQL

  • 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 Microsoft Access to PGSQL 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 PGSQL?
Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real PGSQL 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 PGSQL