Rich Release Format Microsoft® Access Load Script
This document is a guide to loading an RRF subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus into an empty Microsoft Access (MS Access®) database by using the scripts and files created by MetamorphoSys. These operations must be performed on a machine running Microsoft Windows operating system with the MS Access database product installed.
To generate the necessary files and scripts, make the following selections when creating a subset with MetamorphoSys:
- Select the MS Access database in the “Write Database Load Scripts” section of the "Output Options" tab.
- Select the “Add Unicode BOM characters to output files” checkbox on the “Output Options” tab.
- Select the adjacent “UTF-16LE” option from the “character encoding” pick-list.
The RRF subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus must be less than 2GB total size, as this is the upper limit to MS Access databases.
Configuring and Running the Load Script
- Navigate to your output directory using the Windows explorer.
- Open the umls.mdb file by double-clicking on it. This file is preloaded with a macro that will load the database.
- Select "Modules".
- Select the "ImportUMLS" module by double-clicking on it.
- Run the "CreateUMLSSchema" macro. If applicable, enable macros (an online search for "MS Access enable macros" can help with this).
- Any problems should result in an error being reported.
- Ensure the total data set is < 2GB as this is an upper limit on the size of an MS Access database.
- umls.mdb is now loaded and ready for use.
Sample Queries
At this point a fully loaded Microsoft® Access database containing a subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus should exist. This Access database comes pre-installed with a variety of queries. These queries should be parameterized, meaning that they can be run with various values for some of the lookup entries.
Last Reviewed: July 29, 2016