Hi!
Converting the xml to sql takes a long time for big wiki's and people seem to have problems with this step, so why isn't the sql format available for download instead of the xml format?
Our dumps are not 'sql dumps'. We assemble them from all the different parts (memcached, multiple database instances) - so it doesn't really make sense to output in some specific format, as one needs a decent loading routine to load that data into various kinds of stores.
Currently only widely available and supported marshalling format is XML, so hence we use it.
Do note, that if you use SAX-based conversion, conversion to SQL is way more efficient than database ability to load that data, especially if you attempt to maintain all the crossindexes on the fly too.
Domas