SQL dump editor for Mac — filter and clean dumps without the terminal

Editing an SQL dump on the command line means chaining tools that were never meant to understand SQL: a grep to find a table, a fragile sed range to cut it out, an awk script to skip the lines you don't want, then mysqldump flags to try again from the source. Each of those is a one-off you'll have forgotten by next month, and a single misplaced regex can silently corrupt the output.

For an occasional task that's the wrong trade. A native app makes each step visible — you see the tables, tick what you need, and check a preview before anything is written. And because the settings stay on screen, the same job is trivial to repeat next time. DumpCleaner is, as far as we know, the only native macOS and iPadOS app built specifically to filter and clean SQL dumps this way.

What you can do without touching the terminal

DumpCleaner turns the usual shell gymnastics into a handful of controls:

• Pick tables by checkbox — every table in the dump is listed; tick the ones you want to keep or drop.
• Filter statement types — include or exclude CREATE, INSERT, ALTER, DROP, SET and LOCK statements independently.
• Reorder INSERTs by foreign keys — sort inserts into dependency order so parent tables load before their children.
• Open large files by streaming — dumps are processed in chunks with constant memory, so multi-gigabyte files open without freezing.
• Live preview — see the resulting SQL as you change filters, before you commit to an export.
• Estimated output size — know roughly how big the exported file will be before writing it.

Supported formats

DumpCleaner reads dumps from the databases you actually meet in the wild:

• MySQL and MariaDB (mysqldump output)
• PostgreSQL (pg_dump output)
• SQLite
• MS SQL Server

The format is detected automatically from the file content — there's no dialog asking which dialect you have. Schema-qualified names like public.users are understood, so PostgreSQL dumps behave the same as MySQL ones.

Why a native app beats a script

A shell one-liner works once, if you get every flag right. A native app gives you the things a script can't:

• Repeatable — the filter settings are right there on screen, so the same task is one click next month instead of a re-discovered incantation.
• No regex mistakes — DumpCleaner parses the SQL properly instead of matching lines by hand, so you don't silently cut through the middle of an INSERT.
• Preview before export — you see exactly what comes out before writing a single byte.
• Non-destructive — the original dump is never modified; every export goes to a new file.
• Sandboxed and safe — the app runs in the macOS App Sandbox and only touches files you explicitly open.
• Runs on Mac and iPad — the same app, the same features, on both platforms.

Common tasks

Most people arrive with one specific job. Here are the frequent ones — each has its own step-by-step guide:

• Fix "a foreign key constraint fails" on import — reorder INSERTs by dependency so parents load first.
• Open and edit a large SQL dump file — stream multi-gigabyte dumps without running out of memory.
• Extract a single table from a dump — keep just the tables you need and drop the rest.
• Export only the schema (structure) — strip the data and keep the CREATE statements.

Frequently asked questions