Dear fellow programmers,
I have just submitted my new implementation of the Recent Changes and History pages. For these pages the number of database accesses is now drastically reduced. I have also updated the Wikipedia.sql file with the new database scheme. Fortunately it turned out that I didn't have to add any columns, but I did add two new indexes. The code to add these on the running database is in updSchema.sql. I suggest that any future changes on the database schema are also added in the form of SQL statements that can be executed by Jimbo.
Finally, I got some errors on the pages of old versions that occurred because the timestamp field of the page object wasn't set. (It is used in the footer.) I could only remedy this by adding an extra line in WikPage.php that initializes it, but I still don't understand fully why this didn't lead to errors before.
Anyway, I hope you guys have some time to test it, because I couldn't do this as well as I wanted. But this is my first big patch, so please be gentle. :-)
Kind regards,
-- Jan Hidders
PS. My next task will the improvement of the search pages, as Axel already suggest.
I have just updated the schema definition again to remove some superfluous indexes and add some dearly needed ones. The new schema is in wikipedia.sql and the update commands are in updSchema.sql, but before you run it you need to uncomment the commands that still need to be run for your schema.
-- Jan Hidders
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org