On 8/8/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
One way around this could perhaps be to import the full XML dump into a local MySQL, then shutting down MySQL and putting the frozen files from /var/lib/mysql/ onto a Ubuntu "live" CDROM or DVD. Just boot up Ubuntu Linux from this disk, and you can immediately search through the full Wikipedia database. (As long as that fits on the disk...). I have not tried it, and don't know if it's possible to run MySQL from a live disk with pre-loaded tables. Someone with extra time on their hands can find a new hobby here. If one person does this, everybody else can download and burn the CDROM image and get started much faster than waiting for a 30 hour database import.
An interesting idea, but not very useful for people who intend to actually reuse the data, who would then have to dump *and* import it. It would possibly be handy for people who just want to do a statistical analysis or something, but not if you're trying to mirror.
And no, the full Wikipedia database is way, way too large to fit on a DVD. Even the pages-articles one (articles/templates/image descriptions/primary meta-pages) is quite a lot too large, it looks like, at 2.7 GB bz2'd. And that's leaving out images.