Convert SQL dump to psql
Upload a .sql file and get back a psql 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 psql
Generated from the converter's own psql type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | psql 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.
Running the script through psql
psql is PostgreSQL's command-line client rather than the database itself, and the script is written to be fed straight into it. Everything here is about the tool you run, not about the server you run it against.
- →From inside a session already open, \i dump.sql runs the file without leaving the prompt. The script contains no backslash meta-commands of its own, so nothing in it can collide with yours.
- →There is no BEGIN and no COMMIT anywhere in the file. Statements commit as they go, so a failure halfway leaves the tables already created: pass -1 to wrap the whole load in a single transaction, or -v ON_ERROR_STOP=1 to stop at the first error instead of carrying on past it.
- →The script switches standard_conforming_strings on itself instead of trusting the server default, so it behaves identically against a session that has been moved off it.
- →It sets client_encoding to UTF8 for the same reason. The file is written as UTF-8 with nothing to announce that, and psql would otherwise decode it using whatever the client locale says.
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 psql
- →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 psql 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 psql?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real psql 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.