Convert SQL dump file to MySQL
Upload a .sql 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.
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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 SQL dump file
A dump is a schema and its data written out by a database's own export tool, in that tool's own flavour of SQL. Which flavour it is has to be established before a single line of it can be parsed correctly.
- →The dialect is decided by scanning the first 5,000 characters for tell-tale syntax: AUTO_INCREMENT or ENGINE= means MySQL, SERIAL means PostgreSQL, IDENTITY( or NVARCHAR means SQL Server.
- →If your dump opens with thousands of characters of comments and SET statements before the first CREATE TABLE, that scan has nothing to go on and falls back to MySQL. Trimming the preamble fixes it.
- →Dump tools often gzip their output. A .sql.gz is not a recognised extension, so decompress it before uploading.
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 SQL dump file
- →Parsed with a real SQL parser, not regular expressions, so a value containing a closing parenthesis or a semicolon cannot split a row in half.
- →CREATE TABLE types, primary keys, NOT NULL and AUTO_INCREMENT are all read from the dump.
- →The source dialect is detected from the dump itself — MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server dumps all parse.
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 SQL dump file 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 SQL dump file 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.