[Labs-l] current situation with replicated databases in Labs

Sun Mar 3 18:46:37 UTC 2013

I talked with Peter Youngmeister about this on Friday and wanted to
report to you about the current status -- Peter, please correct me if
I'm wrong.

The hardware is set up and the OS installed.  Asher Feldman altered
plans: there will be writable tables alongside the replicated DBs, as
bots/tools makers have requested, but that means we needed to order more
hardware - external SSDs.  That dependency, however, is not something
that should block things or further delay the DB replication.

Peter and Asher are going to sprint together early this week and get to
the point where WMF's legal folks and technical architecture experts can
look at the plans -- especially *which specific columns need to be
redacted for privacy protection* -- and approve.  Once that happens, I
believe Asher and Peter will be able to work without blockers and will
be able to get Labs users the ability to access replicated Wikimedia
databases.  I am, however, not super-clear on the estimate for how much
time that final step will take.

If Peter and Asher run into bottlenecks while getting responses from
Legal, Tim Starling, or others, they can ask me to poke. :-)

Peter, how inaccurate is that? :)
-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation