---
author: einar
comments: true
date: 2007-04-25 14:26:07+00:00
layout: page
slug: databases
title: Databases
wordpress_id: 237
categories:
- Linux
- Science
header:
    image_fullwidth: banner_other.jpg
---

As I've been working to get some results done for my Ph.D. thesis, I've stumbled across the problem of having different data obtained through different software. Even if it's just a matter of text files, the fields are all different and even if dealing with the same data, trying to infer relationships is a pain.<!-- more -->
Therefore I decided to create a small database to host the data of my work and query it accordingly. I didn't want to run a database server, so I settled for [SQLite](http://sqlite.org), a lightweight file-driven database, I don't handle enormous amount of data so it should be ok. Up to now I've inserted parts of the Entrez Gene database. First of all I downloaded the gene_info.gz from NCBI's FTP, which contains data such as gene name, gene symbol, and so on. Then it was a matter of filtering out non-human entries, and to do so I wrote a small script called taxon_filter.py:

[code lang="python"]
#!/usr/bin/env python

import gzip
import sys
import csv

"""Filters NCBI annotation files by human taxon (9606). Works directly from the source
gzipped file and outputs a tab-delimited file."""

class ncbi:
delimiter = '\t'
quotechar = '"'
escapechar = None
doublequote = True
skipinitialspace = False
lineterminator = '\n'
quoting = csv.QUOTE_NONE

def __init__(self):
# Dialect registration
csv.register_dialect("ncbi", self)

ncbi()

if len(sys.argv) < 3:
print "Not enough command line arguments"
sys.exit(0)

try:
compressed_file = gzip.open(sys.argv[1])
except IOError:
print "Could not open file!"
sys.exit(-1)

delim = csv.reader(compressed_file,dialect="ncbi")

try:
destination_file = open(sys.argv[2],"wb")
except IOError:
print "Can't open destination file!"
sys.exit(-1)

write_delim = csv.writer(destination_file,dialect="ncbi")

write_delim.writerow(delim.next())

for row in delim:
if row[0] == "9606":
write_delim.writerow(row)

print "Complete!"
compressed_file.close()
destination_file.close()
sys.exit(0)

[/code]

(apologies, tabs are messed up)

That filtered the file for entries belonging to taxon 9606 (_Homo sapiens) . _Then I had to keep only the interesting bits in the file, so I cut the leading comment and selected only the correct fields:

[code lang="bash"]
sed '1d' gene_info_human | cut -f2,9,3,7-8 > entrez_gene.txt
[/code]

SQLite has Python bindings (officially part of Python since 2.5) but those don't allow the direct import of text files, so I fired up the command line sqlite3 command and created the relevant table, called entrez_gene, and imported the data:

[code lang="bash"]
.separator "\t"
.import datafiles/File_NCBI/entrez_gene.txt entrez_gene
[/code]

Done! This is the first step, then I'll work on creating tables for my own data.