Convert Microsoft Access to psql

Upload a .mdb or .accdb or .mde 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 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.

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 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 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 Microsoft Access 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 Microsoft Access 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 Microsoft Access to something else

Convert something else to psql