Last modified: 2013-06-04 11:25:35 UTC
The current table format is included in the different SQL dump files, but for some uses it's important to have all the table definitions in one file. Such a file exists: it's maintenance/tables.sql in git (formerly in SVN), but it's not easy to figure out which revision of tables.sql must be used for a particular dump. It would be nice if (a link to) the appropriate version of tables.sql was available on the dump page (along with the links to the SQL dump files).
How do you make sql dumps?
A suggestion might be a report about what the current revision of MediaWiki the wiki is running on during the dumping of the wiki database, and output it in the same dump page. Not sure if this is possible entirely though (especially enwiki that takes very long, and there might be code pushed to the live site meanwhile).
The pages-articles (and meta-current and meta-history) files, as well as the stub file, all contain in the MW version in the site information header: <generator>MediaWiki 1.20wmf4</generator> With regular branches and deployments of code in production, I would expect that we would not deploy schema changes mid-branch.
Sooner or later the en wp dumps will wind up running during a deployment that pushes out a new schema, and so some of the tables will be dumped with one schema and some with another. In this case the dump files themselves are their own best documentation. I'm going to wontfix this (feel free to repoen if you have a compelling solution).
