Is converting xBase to T-SQL 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 xBase data keep its types in T-SQL?

Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real T-SQL 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.

Convert xBase to T-SQL

Upload a .dbf file and get back a T-SQL SQL script you can load straight into your database. Types are preserved rather than flattened to text. Free, no registration, up to 10MB.

1Upload your file

Click to upload or drag and drop

CSV, Excel, SQLite, SQL, DBF (max 10 MB)

2Choose target format

How your data is typed in T-SQL

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

Your data	T-SQL type
Whole number	BIGINT
Decimal (money)	DECIMAL(10,2)
Floating point	FLOAT
True / false	BIT
Date	DATE
Date and time	DATETIME2
Short text	NVARCHAR(255)
Long text	NVARCHAR(MAX)
Binary data	VARBINARY(MAX)

Working from an xBase table

xBase is the family name for the record layout dBase defined and Clipper, FoxBase and FoxPro adopted. A file from any of them opens here; the differences live in the header bytes, and those are read rather than assumed.

→Records deleted but never packed are still physically present, flagged with an asterisk. They are skipped, so the converted table holds the rows the application showed and not the ones it hid.
→Clipper is the trap in this family: it wrote version byte 0x03 even for tables with memo columns, so a naive reader picks the wrong memo layout and dies with "unpack requires a buffer of 8 bytes". That case is handled here.
→The header gives each field an 11-byte name slot, so xBase column names are at most 10 characters - a limit that follows the data into the target unless you rename the columns there.

The T-SQL the script actually uses

T-SQL is the language rather than the product, and it is exactly where a generic ANSI SQL script fails against SQL Server. Two of those differences are why this target has a dialect of its own instead of reusing the shared one.

→Date and timestamp values are written as ordinary quoted strings. The ANSI typed literal - the word DATE in front of a quoted date - is not T-SQL, and the server rejects it, which on its own is enough to make a portable script fail to load.
→GO is not a statement in the language at all. sqlcmd, SSMS and Azure Data Studio read it as a batch separator and the server never sees it, so a driver handed the whole file as one string chokes on it: run the file through one of those clients, or split the text on its GO lines and send the pieces in order down the same connection.
→Rows are written 500 to a statement, comfortably under the 1000-row ceiling T-SQL puts on a single VALUES list. That ceiling is what makes a script built around one statement per table fail on any table worth converting.

Reading xBase

→Numeric fields with decimals are read as exact decimals, not floats, so currency does not drift.
→Character field widths are read from the header and carried into the target.
→The code page declared in the file header is used, so Cyrillic, Western European and other legacy DOS encodings decode correctly instead of turning into mojibake. 157 code pages are recognised.
→Files written by dBase III or Clipper declare no code page at all — the header byte for it did not exist yet. For those, the most plausible encoding is chosen by inspecting the text, and the conversion tells you it had to guess. The API takes a sourceEncoding parameter (e.g. cp866) to force it instead of guessing, though the widget above does not have a control for it yet.
→Memo columns keep their text in a separate .dbt or .fpt file. If the .dbf declares one and it was not uploaded, the conversion stops and tells you which file to add, rather than handing you a table whose long text is silently blank.

Writing T-SQL

→String literals carry the N prefix, so non-ASCII text survives whatever collation the database uses.
→Timestamps become DATETIME2. T-SQL’s TIMESTAMP is a row-version counter, not a point in time.
→Identity columns are wrapped in SET IDENTITY_INSERT so explicit key values load.
→Statements are separated with GO in batches.

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 SQL Server:

  sqlcmd -S HOST -U USER -P PASSWORD -d DATABASE -i dump.sql

Notes:

  - Text columns are NVARCHAR and literals carry the N prefix, so
    non-ASCII data survives regardless of database collation.
  - Timestamps are DATETIME2. T-SQL's TIMESTAMP type is a row
    version, not a point in time.

Questions

Is converting xBase to T-SQL 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 xBase data keep its types in T-SQL?: Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real T-SQL 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.