(If you don’t work with pagelinks table, feel free to ignore this message)

Hello,

Here is an update and reminder on the previous announcement regarding normalization of links tables that was sent around a year ago.

As part of that work, soon the pl_namespace and pl_title columns of pagelinks table will be dropped and you will need to use pl_target_id joining with the linktarget table instead. This is basically identical to the templatelinks normalization that happened a year ago.

Currently, MediaWiki writes to both data schemes of pagelinks for new rows in all wikis except English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (we will start writing to these two wikis next week). We have started to backfill the data with the new schema but it will take weeks to finish in large wikis.

So if you query this table directly or your tools do, You will need to update them accordingly. I will write a reminder before dropping the old columns once the data has been fully backfilled.

You can keep track of the general long-term work in T300222 and the specific work for pagelinks in T299947. You can also read more on the reasoning in T222224 or the previous announcement.

Thank you,

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Amir Sarabadani (he/him) Staff Database Architect Wikimedia Foundation