How should I get all transaction history in a format that I can analyze?

Question

I want to download the entire bitcoin transaction history and store it in a database at my end to perform certain analysis. How do I get from the blk*.dat files to a useful format?

Answer 1

I wanted to do a similar thing to put all the transactions in the database (it was PostgreSQL for me, but you can use anything). After some research ended up using bitcoin abe and it worked great for me. Be patient though, it does take a long time - was several days in my case.