Hey guys this is my first question on here. I'm trying to make a local copy of the UniprotKB in SQL. The UniprotKB is 2.1GB, and it comes in XML and a special text format used by SwissProt Here are my options: 1) Use a SAX parser (XML) - I chose Ruby, and Nokogiri. I started writing the parser, but my initial reaction: how would I map the XML schema to the SAX parser? 2) BioPython - I already have BioSQL/Biopython installed, which literally created my SQL schema for me, and I was able to successfully insert one SwissProt/Uniprot txt file into the database. I'm running it right now (crosses fingers) on the entire 2.1gb. Here is the code I'm running: from Bio import SeqIO from BioSQL import BioSeqDatabase from Bio import SwissProt server = BioSeqDatabase.open_database(driver = "MySQLdb", user = "root", passwd = "", host="localhost", db = "bioseqdb") db = server["uniprot"] iterator = SeqIO.parse(open("/path/to/uniprot_sprot.dat", "r"), "swiss") db.load(iterator) server.commit() Edit: it's now crashing because the transactions are getting locked (since the tables are Innodb) Error Number: 1205 Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction. I'm using MySQL version: 5.1.43 Should I switch my database to Postgrelsql ?