mm wrote:

I have a question. Can I read a local wikpedia database using only mtsql? Can somebody help me? How can I do this? Thanks, Mircea

Yes, indeed you can. It's easiest to access the cur_table (the current version of articles, not the history).

Get a Wikipedia cur_table dump, install mysql, tweak its config parameters a bit so it can read the very large chunks the DB dump is written in, and execute the dump as a set of mysql commands. This will build and populate a copy of the database, which you can then directly read using SQL commands to mysql.

A lot of the structure of the database is self-evident, but you will need a bit of advice to get the finer details of all the information in the dump. Backup dumps contain compressed data, and are harder, but not at all impossible, to access.

The same goes for accessing live data from your own local Wikipedia installation's database, if you have one.

-- Neil