How to Convert SQL .BAK Backup Files to CSV for a Specified Table using PHP

Data conversions become more efficient when we skip a few steps between retrieval and reformatting. Using the API solution below, you can quickly retrieve and convert specific tables from a SQL backup file and automatically convert them to CSV. This operation requires two inputs — your table name & .BAK input file — and returns the encoding for your new CSV file. To retrieve the tables stored in your SQL .BAK files, you can use an initial table retrieval operation (find the documentation here).

In order to install the client SDK, we can run the following command in our command line:

composer require cloudmersive/cloudmersive_dataintegration_api_client

After that, we can structure our API calls using the ready-to-run PHP code examples below. To authenticate our connection, we’ll need to supply an API key in the $config line (to get one for free, register a free account on our website):

<?php
require_once(__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php');

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
$config = Swagger\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setApiKey('Apikey', 'YOUR_API_KEY');



$apiInstance = new Swagger\Client\Api\BackupConvertApi(
    
    
    new GuzzleHttp\Client(),
    $config
);
$table_name = "table_name_example"; // string | Name of the table to return
$input_file = "/path/to/inputfile"; // \SplFileObject | Input file to perform the operation on

try {
    $result = $apiInstance->dataintegrationBackupConvertMssqlBakToCsvPost($table_name, $input_file);
    print_r($result);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo 'Exception when calling BackupConvertApi->dataintegrationBackupConvertMssqlBakToCsvPost: ', $e->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
}
?>

That’s all there is to it! Now you can make SQL .BAK to CSV table conversions with ease.