Convert XML to SQL Server
Upload a .xml file and get back a SQL Server 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 SQL Server
Generated from the converter's own SQL Server type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | SQL Server 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 .xml file
XML describes structure but not types, and nests arbitrarily deep, while a table does neither. The reader takes one specific slice of the document, and it is worth checking that the slice is the one you meant.
- →Only the direct children of the row element become columns. A grandchild such as <address><city> has no text of its own at that level, so it arrives as NULL - flatten one level before uploading.
- →Namespaces are reduced to local names, so <ns:order> and <order> are the same element here, and two elements differing only by prefix collide into one column.
- →Attributes are read first and child elements second, so where a row carries both an id attribute and an <id> child, the child's value is what lands in the column.
- →No XSD or DTD is consulted. Every value goes through the same inference a CSV gets, with the same refusal to guess at an ambiguous date.
How names and bytes are written
mssql is the short name the drivers use - the ODBC DSN, SQLAlchemy's mssql+pyodbc, the container image. What it produces is ordinary T-SQL text, and the details worth checking before you run it are how it writes names and how it writes raw bytes.
- →Identifiers are wrapped in square brackets rather than double quotes, and a bracket inside a source name is turned into an underscore before the wrapping goes on: a column named Order]Date is created as [Order_Date], so a bracket in your data can never close a name early.
- →The identifier cap is 128 characters, high enough that almost every source name survives untouched - one that Oracle would have to cut at 30 arrives here whole.
- →Binary columns are VARBINARY(MAX) and their values are written as bare 0x hex literals, with no quotes around them and no conversion function wrapped over them.
Reading XML
- →The row element is whichever child repeats — no configuration needed.
- →Attributes become columns alongside child elements, so nothing on the row itself is left behind. What a table cannot hold is depth: only the row element and its immediate children are read, so nested structures need flattening by one level first.
- →Empty and self-closing elements become NULL.
Writing SQL Server
- →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 XML to SQL Server 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 XML data keep its types in SQL Server?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real SQL Server 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.