What SQL is
SQL here means the statements that move a table into a database: INSERT INTO with a VALUES list, and optionally the CREATE TABLE that defines the columns.
Anyone seeding a database, moving a spreadsheet into an application, or writing a migration.
What TOML is
TOML is a configuration format with explicit types and a table syntax, designed to be unambiguous where YAML is clever.
Rust and Python projects, and anything with a pyproject.toml or Cargo.toml.
What changes when you convert SQL to TOML
Column names come from the INSERT column list, or from a CREATE TABLE if one is present. Quoted strings are unquoted, doubled quotes are collapsed, and NULL becomes an empty cell.
Each row becomes an entry in an array of tables. Keys are sanitised to bare keys where possible and quoted where not.
What carries over from SQL to TOML
SQL records 3 things about a table that TOML has no way to hold.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in TOML, so a null and an empty string in the SQL both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
TOML has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
SQL can be read one record at a time. TOML has to be complete before it means anything, so the whole table is held in memory while it is written and a file that gets cut off part way through is not partly usable - it is unusable.
Both formats record types, so numbers, booleans and nulls survive as themselves rather than as text.
The identifier 007 comes out of the TOML as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a TOML file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the TOML.