Convert TSV to psql
Upload a .csv or .tsv 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.
Click to upload or drag and drop
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 .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.
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 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 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 TSV 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 TSV 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.