Convert SQL dump 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 data | Postgres type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | BIGINT |
| Decimal (money) | NUMERIC(10,2) |
| Floating point | DOUBLE PRECISION |
| True / false | BOOLEAN |
| Date | DATE |
| Date and time | TIMESTAMP |
| Short text | TEXT |
| Long text | TEXT |
| Binary data | BYTEA |
Working from a .sql file
A .sql file is only text containing statements, so what you get out depends entirely on which statements are in it. Schema and data both have to be present for the result to be a database rather than an empty shell.
- →Four things are used: CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE ... PRIMARY KEY, INSERT and COPY. Views, triggers, stored procedures, indexes and GRANT statements are read past rather than converted.
- →A file with INSERTs but no CREATE TABLE still produces its rows, with a warning that the columns are unnamed - the file never said what they were called.
- →A file with neither comes back with "No CREATE TABLE or INSERT statements were found", which usually means the schema lives in a second file.
- →psql meta-commands - the lines beginning with a backslash, like \connect - are client directives rather than SQL, and are skipped before parsing.
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
- →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 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 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.