Convert pgAdmin backup to MariaDB
Upload a .backup or .dump file and get back a MariaDB 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 MariaDB
Generated from the converter's own MariaDB type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | MariaDB type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | BIGINT |
| Decimal (money) | DECIMAL(10,2) |
| Floating point | DOUBLE |
| True / false | TINYINT(1) |
| Date | DATE |
| Date and time | DATETIME |
| Short text | VARCHAR(255) |
| Long text | LONGTEXT |
| Binary data | LONGBLOB |
Working from a pgAdmin backup
pgAdmin's Backup dialog is a front end to pg_dump, so what you end up with depends on which format you picked in it - and the default is not plain SQL, which surprises people expecting a file they can read.
- →In pgAdmin's server and container modes the backup is written on the machine running pgAdmin rather than on yours, under that installation's storage directory for your login. Fetch it with pgAdmin's own file manager before you can upload it anywhere.
- →If the dialog refused to produce a file at all and complained that a utility was not found, that is its Binary Path preference pointing at no pg_dump. It is a pgAdmin setting, not a problem with your database.
- →The dialog's "Do not save Owner" and "Do not save Privileges" toggles make no difference to the result: those statements are stripped when the archive is unpacked, whichever way you set them.
What MariaDB gets, and how it differs
MariaDB and MySQL are close enough here that one dialect serves both, and picking MariaDB does not select a different code path: the script is byte for byte the one a MySQL conversion produces. The differences worth flagging are in what you do with it.
- →The README packed beside the script names both engines in its load command, because the invocation is the same either way - the file is piped into a client rather than executed by the server.
- →The CREATE DATABASE line in that README asks for utf8mb4_unicode_ci and not for utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci, which is MySQL 8's default. MariaDB has never implemented the 0900 collations, and unicode_ci is the one both engines have.
- →Date-and-time columns are declared DATETIME rather than TIMESTAMP, so what loads is the wall-clock value the source held. No session time zone is applied on the way in, and none is applied when you read it back out.
Reading pgAdmin backup
- →Reads pg_dump custom-format archives (.backup, .dump) — pgAdmin's default backup option — as well as plain SQL dumps.
- →Data written as COPY blocks is read, not just INSERT statements. COPY is pg_dump's default, so a reader that only understands INSERT returns your tables with none of their rows.
- →Primary keys declared by a later ALTER TABLE, which is how pg_dump writes them, are preserved.
Writing MariaDB
- →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 pgAdmin backup to MariaDB 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 pgAdmin backup data keep its types in MariaDB?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real MariaDB 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.