Hi,
I was wondering if there was a reason why the date fields are stored as char(14), doesn't that make them a string? I want to analyse the dates things happened - between ranges etc, and could do with changing them to a double or big int or even a mysql date! Storing them in a numeric format would also increase performance marginally, as the field size would become much smaller. Am I missing something important about MySQL/mediawiki date handling? Will MW break if I change the underlying format? I have never seen a non numeric string in a timestamp...
Kind regards,
Alex