Micro Focus Studio Enterprise Edition Test Server > Programming > Mainframe Programming > IMS Support > Developing IMS Applications > Loading Databases

Loading Databases

To load a database you can either use the database management utility (as described in the section IMSDBU Utility) or perform the following steps:

Navigate to the folder containing the .dat files.
Enter the following command for each .dat file:
```
mfims imsdbu load datfilename
```

Note: If you have more than one database to load you can use the Windows for command to simplify this operation, for example:

for %i in (*.dat) do mfims imsdbu load %i

datfilename is case sensitive.

By default, this loads the database from a file with the same basename as datfilename but with the extension .DBU. You can change this behavior using the DSN and LAYOUT options.