Convert TSV to MySQL

Upload a .csv or .tsv 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.

Click to upload or drag and drop

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 dataMySQL type
Whole numberBIGINT
Decimal (money)DECIMAL(10,2)
Floating pointDOUBLE
True / falseTINYINT(1)
DateDATE
Date and timeDATETIME
Short textVARCHAR(255)
Long textLONGTEXT
Binary dataLONGBLOB

Working from a .tsv file

Tab-separated files come out of database shells, BI exports and anything that had to avoid commas inside its own values. They go through the same reader as CSV - the tab simply wins the separator sniff - so there is nothing to configure.

  • The extension is what routes an upload, and only .csv and .tsv reach this reader. A tab-separated file saved as .txt or .tab is not recognised, so rename it before uploading.
  • Because the separator is detected from the content and not the extension, a file named .csv that is really tab-separated is still read correctly.
  • Quoting rules still apply: a double quote opening a field is treated as a quote character, which is worth knowing for exports that never intended to quote anything.

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 TSV

  • Leading zeros are preserved. A column containing 01234 is kept as text, never turned into the number 1234.
  • An empty cell becomes NULL, not an empty string — the two mean different things once the data is in a database.
  • Dates are only treated as dates when the format is unambiguous. 03/04/2025 could be March 4th or April 3rd, so it stays text unless another value in the column settles it.

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 TSV 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 TSV 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.

This conversion, under other names

Convert TSV to something else

Convert something else to MySQL