Convert TSV to PostgreSQL

Upload a .csv or .tsv file and get back a PostgreSQL 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 PostgreSQL

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

Your dataPostgreSQL 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 .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.

What the PostgreSQL script contains

The conversion produces one dump.sql with a README beside it, zipped. It is a script you can open, grep and edit before you run it rather than an archive a tool has to unpack, and it is deliberately sparing in what it declares.

  • Every string column is declared TEXT, whatever length the source declared for it. PostgreSQL stores a short value in a TEXT column exactly as cheaply as in a VARCHAR, and an unbounded column cannot reject a row on load for being a few characters too long.
  • Identifiers are all double-quoted, and even so a name on PostgreSQL's reserved list is given a trailing underscore: a column called user arrives as user_, order as order_, limit as limit_.
  • A decimal column whose source declared no scale is given six decimal places rather than none, keeping whatever precision it did declare: NUMERIC(10,6) from a source that said 10, and NUMERIC(18,6) from one that declared neither. A scale of zero would have the server round 19.99 to 20 as it loaded.

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 PostgreSQL

  • 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 TSV to PostgreSQL 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 PostgreSQL?
Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real PostgreSQL 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

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