Convert PostgreSQL backup to MySQL
Upload a .backup or .dump 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 data | MySQL 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 PostgreSQL backup
A PostgreSQL backup is not one thing. pg_dump can write plain SQL, a compressed custom-format archive or a tar archive, and all three routinely end up carrying the same .dump or .backup extension.
- →The first five bytes decide: PGDMP means an archive, which is unpacked with pg_restore, and anything else is treated as plain SQL. The extension is never trusted for this.
- →pg_restore is run with --file=- to print SQL to a pipe, so your backup is converted without ever being restored into a live PostgreSQL server: nothing connects to a database and nothing is created.
- →The directory format, pg_dump -Fd, is a folder rather than a file and cannot be uploaded. Re-dump it as -Fc or as plain SQL.
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 PostgreSQL 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 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 PostgreSQL backup 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 PostgreSQL backup 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.