Convert SQL dump file to Postgres

Upload a .sql file and get back a Postgres 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 Postgres

Generated from the converter's own Postgres type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.

Your dataPostgres 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 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.

The oldest PostgreSQL this loads into

Postgres is the informal spelling and the one most people type. Since the name says nothing about a version, the useful question for this page is which server releases the generated script runs on, and that is decided by the newest piece of syntax in it.

  • →The identity clause on auto-increment columns is the newest thing in the file, and it arrived in release 10. That is the floor for loading the script unedited.
  • →Everything else is far older: the hex escape the script uses for binary values has been accepted since 9.0, and jsonb, which is what a JSON column is declared as, since 9.4.
  • →On a server below the floor the script still loads if you delete the identity clauses by hand. The columns keep every value they were given, because each INSERT names them explicitly; they simply stop assigning new ones.

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 Postgres

  • →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 SQL dump file to Postgres 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 Postgres?
Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real Postgres 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 SQL dump file to something else

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