J Apple wrote:
Thanks for the message... Some even more basic stuff.
Short answer: if you can't understand the README you probably won't be able to make it work.
iv'e tried running MWdumper on several machines with win XP and Mac OS X. Nothing happens when I double click the executable .jar file. I've tried instaling JRE 1.5, but still can't get the file to run... on some machines I see a couple folders with .class files in them, but don't know what to do with those. On others I see an executable .jar file.
I see that MWdumper is a command line interface, BUT, where would I type the commands in.
You'll need some basic command-line computer literacy to operate the current version of MWDumper. This means knowing how to start a command-line terminal on your operating system, how to type commands and run them, etc.
Some sample command lines with parameters are in the README; again if you have difficulty understanding this documentation, you probably will have trouble operating it. That's not an insult; it's just a command-line program with lots of scary options, which is inherently a bit intimidating because it's designed to do several somewhat complicated things.
What exactly does using MWdumper accomplish? does MWdumper simply create an SQl file from the XML dump?? OR does it connect my local machine to my webhost so I can import the DB file?
For SQL output, MWDumper can either produce a text file full of SQL statements, or it can make a direct connection to a MySQL server (under ideal conditions) and send commands directly there. This of course requires being able to contact the server; if it's remote this may be difficult (eg requiring a SSH tunnel).
IF it doesn't connect to my webhost, then how would I upload this massive DB into mySQl, since phpmyAdmin has a limit on file size that is much smaller than the DB size?
If you have no other direct access to your MySQL server than phpMyAdmin, you probably are not in a good position to work with this kind of large data dump.
Incidentally, I've uploaded a new version of mwdumper.jar. This doesn't yet include a GUI frontend, but does: * bundle the Xerces XML library so it works on Java 1.4 * bundle the MySQL connector, so it _might_ work to connect to a database directly without fetching a separate driver jar (not tested) * should run through our dumps on the default heap size
http://download.wikimedia.org/tools/mwdumper.jar
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)