Because I was bored rigid by the World database used in the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide. I wanted something a little more colourful to experiment on.

It shouldn't take too much fiddling to get it to work on any other half decent database package. The MySQL dump files are just a bunch if CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements. ANy MySQL specific commands (e.g. for character sets) are buried within comments that over DBs will just ignore. So have a go, and let us know how you get on.

I took the King James and Basic English versions from
http://www.o-bible.com, and the Apocrypha from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12.

You'll find a table called credits in the database which references the sources.

Judicious use of the LOAD DATA statement and some bit of fiddling with the original text files.

Nope, it's a geek project! But if you are a bible scholar and find this helpful, then more power to you. Let me know and I might promote you.

Once I had the Bible In SQL, I found I was able to do all sorts of fun stuff, like choose random chapters, compare different translations, make my own biblical mash-ups, and play with SQL features like views, stored procedures and fulltext indexes.