Convert pgAdmin backup to SQLite
Upload a .backup or .dump 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 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 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 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 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 pgAdmin backup 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 pgAdmin backup 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.