gistfile1.txt

---
layout: post
title: Convert a MySQL database to a SQLite3 database
---

<span class="intro">I wanted to convert a</span> <a href="http://mysql.org">MySQL</a> database to a <a href="http://sqlite.org">SQLite3</a> database the other day. I did some searching and found a <a href="http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=ConverterTools">good script on the SQLite3 site</a> . It didn&#8217;t quite work for me, but it was close (left a bunch of random MySQL &#8220;set&#8221; statements everywhere and used MySQL&#8217;s default multiple insert syntax). After some tweaking I got it to create the file without errors. Here&#8217;s my version for anyone that needs to do the same thing (requires <em>mysqldump</em> and <em>perl</em> be installed on your system):

{% highlight bash %}
#!/bin/sh

if [ "x$1" == "x" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 &lt;dbname&gt;" 
  exit
fi

if [ -e "$1.db" ]; then
  echo "$1.db already exists.  I will overwrite it in 15 seconds if you do not press CTRL-C." 
  COUNT=15
  while [ $COUNT -gt 0 ]; do
    echo "$COUNT" 
    sleep 1
    COUNT=$((COUNT - 1))
  done
  rm $1.db
fi

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump -u root --compact --compatible=ansi --default-character-set=binary --extended-insert=false $1 |
grep -v ' KEY "' |
grep -v ' UNIQUE KEY "' |
grep -v ' PRIMARY KEY ' |
sed 's/^SET.*;//g' |
sed 's/ UNSIGNED / /g' |
sed 's/ auto_increment/ primary key autoincrement/g' |
sed 's/ smallint([0-9]*) / integer /g' |
sed 's/ tinyint([0-9]*) / integer /g' |
sed 's/ int([0-9]*) / integer /g' |
sed 's/ enum([^)]*) / varchar(255) /g' |
sed 's/ on update [^,]*//g' |
sed "s/\\\'/''/g" |                                                                                    # convert MySQL escaped apostrophes to SQLite   \' =&gt; ''
sed 's/\\\"/"/g' |                                                                                    # convert escaped double quotes into regular quotes
sed "s/’/''/g" |                                                                                    # MySQL was outputting this weird character as a single quote?
sed 's/\\\n/\n/g' |
sed 's/\\r//g' |
perl -e 'local $/;$_=&lt;&gt;;s/,\n\)/\n\)/gs;print "begin;\n";print;print "commit;\n"' |
perl -pe '
if (/^(INSERT.+?)\(/) {
  $a=$1;
  s/\\'\''/'\'\''/g;
  s/\\n/\n/g;
  s/\),\(/\);\n$a\(/g;
}
' &gt; $1.sql
cat $1.sql | sqlite3 $1.sqlite3 &gt; $1.err
ERRORS=`cat $1.err | wc -l`
if [ $ERRORS == 0 ]; then
  echo "Conversion completed without error. Output file: $1.sqlite3" 
  rm $1.sql
  rm $1.err
else
  echo "There were errors during conversion.  Please review $1.err and $1.sql for details." 
fi
{% endhighlight %}

<strong>Update, 11/3/08</strong> Updated the script above. Fixed a couple issues with newlines and lowercasing everything also lowercased the actual values in the tables! For some reason I had convinced myself it was only lowercasing the table and column names&#8230; There is still an issue where apostrophes are turned into weird characters, seemingly <span class="caps">UTF</span>-8. This might just be a simple matter of telling <em>mysqldump</em> to use latin instead of utf-8 encoding? I haven&#8217;t played around with it, but if anyone figures it out please let me know.