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Felipe Ortega wrote:
Yesterday, I was moving around mysqldump files of our processed databases from parsed Wikipedia dumps, and this simple question came to my mind.
Is there any special reason to use an "ad-hoc" XML schema for Wikipedia dumps?
1) The format is relatively stable, unlike our database schema.
2) Our databases are spread over dozens of servers, in mixes of internal binary compression formats whose interpretation is dependent on our configuration and custom code.
3) Our internal databases mix public and private information, which we have to separate for external dumps. Thus only completely public tables are dumped with mysqldump.
Thus, we use a stable, safe data schema for public page dumps. Dumping raw SQL of these tables would be unstable, insecure, and useless for most people.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)