[Wikitech-l] Replicating enwiki and dewiki for research purposes

Hi list,

so I need to set up a local instance of the dewiki- and enwiki-DB with all revisions.. :-D

I know it's rather a mammoth project so I was wondering if somebody could give me some pointers?

First of all, I would need to know what kind of hardware I should get. Is it possible/smart to have it all in two ginormous MySQL-Instance (one for each of the languages) or will I need to do sharding?

I don't need it to run smoothly. I only need to be able to query the database (and I know some of these queries can run for days)

I will probably have access to some rather powerful machines here at the university and I have also quite a few workstation-machines on which I could theoretically do the sharding.

Thanks in advance Andreas

PS: If it helps: I'm living in Berlin and I will gladly also just have a face-to-face meeting with anybody willing to share wisdom :)