Wikipedia talk:SQL query requests

Does this include requsts for updates to special pages? If so I believe there are outstanding requests for updates to orphans and most wanted. SimonP 20:40, Aug 1, 2003 (UTC)

I believe those put too much load on the server to be done at all at the moment. Angela

Yes, those features will probably not be available until someone improves the PHP code. There is already a large backlog of bugs and feature requests, so it might be a while. -- Tim Starling 03:46, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

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Should this page be protected so only sysops can request queries, or is anyone allowed to? Angela

I don't see why it should be protected. The idea of making SQL queries sysop-only was to protect against malicious queries. Since queries are now developer-moderated, there's no need to restrict access. -- Tim Starling 03:46, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC)

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Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump:

Nutty sysop queries

I don't know who did it because this can only be seen when the query is finished. But someone started several queries of the form

select count(*) from old

or

select count(*) from old where ...

This is crazy! InnoDB has no rowcount, so it has to go through the entire table to count it -- that can take ages with our multi gigabyte OLD table that stores all revisions. With a WHERE condition on the content it's even worse. Worse, after I manually killed the query the person started it again! Whoever did this should never do an SQL query again because they evidently don't know how to handle this feature properly.

Furthermore, I have disabled SQL queries for the time being because they cause constant slowdowns and I don't want to wonder each time the wiki is slow whether this is caused by yet another out of control query. If you want to run a query, paste it on my talk page, I'll take a look at it and run it if necessary.—Eloquence 03:09, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Tut! Some idiot's ruined it for everyone! CGS 10:24, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Someone mentioned recently having different types of sysop - I can't remember who it was, but perhaps this coud be revisited now, so that those who can be trusted with SQL can read the database. I only ever use the queries that are shown on my user page. Is there a way that these could be okayed, and then I would allowed to run them, or do I have to go via Erik each time? Angela 12:31, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

In the long run it'd probably be better to have a separate server for analysis that runs a periodically updated copy of the database (maybe nightly). There's a lot of interesting (and potentially expensive) queries that don't really need to be run on the live database, but would be interesting to run on a backup copy (and not everyone has the knowledge or resources to download the dump and set up their own to play around with). For example, Wikipedia:Wikipedians by number of edits is an interesting page, but there's no reason that query would ever need to be run on the live database. --Delirium 19:36, Jul 29, 2003 (UTC)

Change of page title

Maybe this page should be changed to requests for people who have a recent download of the database and know how to do this stuff to do things. Obviously at a much better title than that. :)

Then it could cover requests that really are for SQL and other things that require perl and the like.

Angela 00:14, Oct 29, 2003 (UTC)

Make a separate page for the requests which need scripting. The special page updates have been requested in half a dozen different places, it would be nice if there was a place where they could finally be put to rest. Requests which require scripting are a different kettle of fish to the sort of thing this page was created for. I said I would be happy to run SQL queries, because they only take a minute. A couple of hours of rewriting PHP scripts is not quite what I was thinking. -- Tim Starling 00:20, Oct 29, 2003 (UTC)

Where is the right place to ask for those, btw? For example, it'd be nice if someone with a backup copy of the DB and the appropriate scripts would update Wikipedia:Wikipedians by number of edits, and I know someone has the scripts to do so already written (since it was updated August 8), but I'm not sure where to request the updating. --Delirium 00:29, Oct 29, 2003 (UTC)

There isn't a place. You can create one if you like. Wikipedia:Wikipedians by number of edits can only be updated by someone with a backup copy of the previous revisions as well. Ram-man rewrote the scripts to make them easy for him to use and impossible for anyone else, then he buggered off. -- Tim Starling 00:33, Oct 29, 2003 (UTC)

I created Wikipedia:Scripting requests and moved the two things that had been wrongly placed here to it. Angela