howard chen escribió:
- Why the datasebase dump (/download.wikimedia.org) do not use a
unqiue format? eg. some files are XML and some files are SQL
Time ago it used SQL. Mediawiki tables were exposed, like the cur table. With MediaWiki 1.5, there was a change on the db format, so some tables went out, and others appeared. This broke some usages. Instead of giving new sql files, which may get outdated, export changed to the current XML format, so download format will remain stable, no matter how is it really saved (e.g. article contents are not on the db, but on 'external storage').
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps#What_happened_to_the_SQL_dumps.3F
Some files have kept SQL format, and there's probably no need to change it for now.
- Why not output as CSV format so we can use mysqlimport, which is a
LOT faster for all of us.
thanks.
I hope you're comparing against mwdumper, and not against importDump.php ;) You can always translate them into any format (SQL, CSV...) you want. The reasoning above applies here as well.
Platonides