This site does not have a searchable interface to the Bible or Koran. There's plenty of sites out there which do. No, this site has files which enable you to swiftly load the Koran and/or Bible into your own MySQL database. And because the files are plain text, it wouldn't take a lot of fiddling to get them to load on any database system.

You'll need to have access to a working MySQL client/server setup, with the create database privelege. You can download MySQL for free from the official MySQL site at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#downloads .

Creating the Bible SQL database

Download either bible.mysql.gz or bible.mysql.txt from this site's Download page. Linux / Mac users will probably want the former, Windows users the latter.

1. If you have the .gz file, unzip it at the command line with
   

   gunzip bible.mysql.gz
   

   Your 3M zipped file should expand into an 11M file called bible.mysql.
   
   

2. Feed the bible database dump file through your mysql client program.
   mysql < bible.mysql

   You'll notice I've left out the hostname, user and pass arguments. Like many people, I've set up a .my.cnf file in my home directory so I don't need to type them over and over again. But if you do, the syntax is
   

   mysql -h hostname -u username -pxxxx < bible.mysql
   
   Or, if you started with the plain text file the command will be
   
   mysql < bible.mysql.txt

   The dumpfile will create the database for you, if it doesn't already exist. It takes about 7 secs to create on my box, and my hardware is not particularly souped up. The database tables under the mysql data directory take up approx 20M of disk space. You can of course delete the dump file after creating the database to free up some space.
   
   

3. Presto! You have a new database called bible. Open your mysql client program with

   mysql -u username -h hostname -pxxxxx bible

   Check that you have all four tables:

   mysql> show tables from bible;
   +-----------------+
   | Tables_in_bible |
   +-----------------+
   | apoc            |
   | bible           |
   | bible_basic     |
   | books           |
   +-----------------+
   

   The King James Version is contained in the bible table, the Basic English bible is in the bible_basic table, the Apocrypha is in the apoc table, and the books table contains mappings of book abbreviations to book names. It also says which testament a book belongs to.

   Do a desc tablename on any table to see the structure. They're all pretty simple.

The Koran Database

Pretty much as above except instead of bible.mysql.txt, you'll be using koran.mysql.txt. The koran file creates another database called, unsurprisingly, koran.

That's it. Now get playing with some queries.

Problems

With a brand new MySQL installation, it might bomb out with an error

ERROR 1044 (42000) at line 18: Access denied for user 'richselby'@'localhost' to database 'bible'

This means that your mysql user doesn't have permission to use the bible database which it has just created. The solution to this is to run mysql preferably as root or any user with a high degree of privilege, and run the command

CREATE DATABASE bible;
GRANT ALL ON bible.* TO 'richselby'@localhost;

Obviously, stick your own username and host in the command, not mine.