Integrated Taxonomic Information System

Downloading

A version of the full ITIS database is available for downloading via HTTP at http://www.itis.gov/ftp_download.html . There are versions for Informix and for Microsoft SQL Server. I use the Informix version.

MySQL schema

The MySQL schema mirrors the Informix schema, with a few syntax changes. When importing the ITIS dump, dates have to be converted into the correct format using the MySQL function STR_TO_DATE, for example

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/Users/rpage/Desktop/Data/itis.111506/comme00117.unl' 
INTO TABLE itis.comments 
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|'  
(
comment_id,
commentator,
comment_detail,
comment_time_stamp,
@update_date
)
SET update_date = STR_TO_DATE(@update_date, '%m/%d/%Y');

The complete schema and import functions are here: http://code.google.com/p/iphylo/source/browse/trunk/data/itis/itis-mysql.sql

Then import the data

mysql -u

<username>