Hoi,

Your approach is technically valid. It is equally obvious in part the wrong approach. Where you say we have to consider if Wikidata is the best store for all kinds of data, you may indicate the inadequacies of Wikidata in relation to particular kinds of data we already store, want to use. The fact is that this is what Wikidata is being used for. In addition there is more data that people want to include in Wikidata that will provide a real service, a service that blends in really well with our mission.

For me it does not really matter how and where what is stored. In this thread it is relevant to pursue an answer to the question how will we scale, how will we serve the needs that are now served with Wikidata and the needs that are not yet served by Wikidata. Wikidata is the project and as long as data comes together to be manipulated or queried in a consistent manner it may be Wikibase or whatever.

The issue is how do we scale, not why we are to accept too little resources by restricting the functionality of Wikidata.

Thanks,

GerardM

On Sat, 4 May 2019 at 09:38, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi!

> For the technical guys, consider our growth and plan for at least one
> year. When the impression exists that the current architecture will not
> scale beyond two years, start a project to future proof Wikidata.

We may also want to consider if Wikidata is actually the best store for
all kinds of data. Let's consider example:

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q57009452

This is an entity that is almost 2M in size, almost 3000 statements and
each edit to it produces another 2M data structure. And its dump, albeit
slightly smaller, still 780K and will need to be updated on each edit.

Our database is obviously not optimized for such entities, and they
won't perform very well. We have 21 million scientific articles in the
DB, and if even 2% of them would be like this, it's almost a terabyte of
data (multiplied by number of revisions) and billions of statements.

While I am not against storing this as such, I do wonder if it's
sustainable to keep such kind of data together with other Wikidata data
in a single database. After all, each query that you run - even if not
related to that 21 million in any way - will have to still run in within
the same enormous database and be hosted on the same hardware. This is
especially important for services like Wikidata Query Service where all
data (at least currently) occupies a shared space and can not be easily
separated.

Any thoughts on this?

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@wikimedia.org