Preparation for the project: SNP database(NCBI) structure

Reference:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/snp_summary.cgi

dbSNP Component Availability Dates:

Component	Date available
dbSNP web query for build 135:	Oct 13, 2011
ftp data for build 135:	Nov 03, 2011
Entrez Indexing for build 135:	Oct 28, 2011
BLAST database for build 135:	Nov 14, 2011

-  The complete data for build 135 are available at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/snp/ in multiple formats.
-  All formats and conventions are described in ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/snp/00readme.txt.


 DATABASE STRUCTURE
Since the inception of build 125, the design of dbSNP has been altered to a "hub
and spoke" model, where the dbSNP_main table acts as the hub of a wheel, storing
all of the central tables of the database, while each spoke of the wheel is an
organism-specific database that contains the latest data for a specific
organism.

Schema Documentation Source:
dbSNP uses standard SQL DDL(Data Definition Language) to create schema tables,
views for those tables, and indexes.  The FTP database directory
(ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/snp/database/) contains the schema, data, and SQL
statements to create the tables and indices for dbSNP:

The organism_schema (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/snp/database/organism_schema/) sub-
directory contains links to the schema DDL for each organism specific database.



*** Creating a local copy of dbSNP ***

Instructions for creating a local copy of dbSNP are located at:
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/snp/database/README.create_local_dbSNP.txt  OR
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=handbook.section.ch5.ch5-s6

*** Importing sections of dbSNP into a local spreadsheet ***

The ".bcp" files in the organism subdirectories "/organism_data" and
"/shared_data" may be loaded into most spreadsheet programs by setting the field
delimiter character to "TAB".