Skim

skim is a command-line tool that converts SQL dump files into formats your tools actually understand.

There are times when I want to analyse SQL data and need it in JSON or some other format. Previously, I would import the dump into a local database, then write a script to export it. It worked, but it was a lot of steps for something that should be simple. So I thought: why not build a tool that generates the file directly from the SQL dump, skipping the database entirely?

skim reads the dump file as a stream and converts every INSERT row into the format you actually need: JSON, JSONL, CSV, YAML, TOML, or Parquet. Rather than loading the entire file into memory, which can be a problem for large dumps. It reads in chunks, so memory usage stays low and consistent regardless of file size.