Convert XML to MySQL
Upload a .xml 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 data | MySQL type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | BIGINT |
| Decimal (money) | DECIMAL(10,2) |
| Floating point | DOUBLE |
| True / false | TINYINT(1) |
| Date | DATE |
| Date and time | DATETIME |
| Short text | VARCHAR(255) |
| Long text | LONGTEXT |
| Binary data | LONGBLOB |
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.
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 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 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 XML 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 XML 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.