Convert SQLite to Postgres
Upload a .sqlite or .db or .sqlite3 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.
Click to upload or drag and drop
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 .sqlite file
SQLite is a complete relational database in a single file, which makes it both the easiest source to read and the one people most often need to get out of: the tables, names and constraints are already there to be carried over.
- →The database is opened read-only through a file: URI, so the file you uploaded is never written to, not even to tidy up after itself.
- →SQLite's own bookkeeping tables - anything named sqlite_%, such as sqlite_sequence - are left out. Every other table is converted, in alphabetical order.
- →Declared types are matched the way SQLite matches them, by substring, so VARCHAR(20), NVARCHAR and CHARACTER all land as text columns.
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 SQLite
- →Declared types, primary keys, NOT NULL constraints and blobs all carry through.
- →SQLite reports INTEGER PRIMARY KEY as nullable because it aliases the rowid; the conversion corrects that.
- →SQLite type affinity is loose, so a NUMERIC column with no declared scale is given room for decimals rather than being rounded to whole numbers.
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 SQLite 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 SQLite 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.