Importing data

Right-click a table and choose Import into table, or use Import in the toolbar. The wizard has three steps.

Supported formats

Format	Extensions
Text	.txt, .csv, .tsv
JSON	.json
XML	.xml
Excel	.xlsx, .xls

The format is detected from the file extension; you can override it.

Step 1 — file and parsing options

Pick the file, then tell NabuSQL how to read it.

For text files:

• Encoding — UTF-8, Windows-1250 and the rest. Get this wrong and accented characters arrive mangled.
• Delimiter — comma, semicolon, tab or your own.
• Decimal separator — . or ,. This is the setting that quietly ruins numeric imports from European spreadsheets, so check it.
• Date and time delimiters — how 2026-07-28 and 14:30:00 are punctuated in the file.

For Excel files you also pick the sheet, and the same decimal and date settings apply.

Step 2 — preview

NabuSQL parses the file and shows the first rows exactly as it understood them. This is where you catch a wrong delimiter or a shifted header row — before anything touches the database.

Step 3 — target and mapping

Choose the destination table, then map each source column to a target column. You can import into an existing table or create a new table from the file's structure.

Columns you leave unmapped are skipped.

Running the import

The result reports how many rows were inserted, how many were skipped, and lists the errors. A failing row does not abort the whole import — you get the rest of the data plus a list of what did not make it.

Tips

• Import into an empty copy of the table first when the source file is from an unfamiliar system. Duplicate in the table right-click menu makes that copy in one step.
• If numbers arrive as text or as zeros, the decimal separator in step 1 is almost always the cause.
• Large files stream rather than loading whole into memory, so a multi-hundred-megabyte CSV is not a problem.

Loading a whole SQL file

To run a .sql dump rather than import tabular data, right-click the database and choose ▶ Execute SQL file. To rebuild a database from an XML document, see Building a database from XML.