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Rob Church wrote:
On 10/01/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
It would also be good if trusted users (say, anyone whose login is over four days old) could run SQL directly on the en: database. I have a few outer joins I really really need to check.
In an ideal world, you could use the toolserver for it.
The problem with trusting people to run even select queries on the English Wikipedia database is that trust does not equal sufficient SQL ability to write queries which do not suck up all our time, even with Tim's natty timeout script.
Rob may be too young to remember, but back when dinosaurs ruled the earth we used to have [[Special:Asksql]] where anyone could run read-only queries on the wiki database.
Then... only sysops.
Then... only developers.
Then... we took it out entirely and run things directly on the database when we need to.
Getting the toolserver was *super awesome* because it lets people run those fun queries and grind *someone else's server* into little metallic flakes instead of the production machines. :)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)