Due to two conflicting summits in (our own and the GSoC Summit) around our usual schema change release date, we’ve decided to move the autumn schema change to 17 November, 2014. This will ensure that our developers are properly rested before attempting a hard task such as a schema change.
We hope this won’t cause too much trouble for everyone downstream.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Can I post question about dump file here? Most important dump files such as the file “artist” has column that look like “2011-05-17 01:22:02.558151+00” which seems to mean the last time it has been edited.
What if just release of that artist is edited at 2014-07-23 01:22:02, but nothing about that artist per se (like hometown, birthday, nickname, etc) is changed? Will 2014-07-23 01:22:02 appear as that artist’s latest edit time in the next publication of mbdump?
Is there any detailed codebook of how this date is updated?
last_updated is only updated when data in a row changes. So editing a release would not change the last_updated for its artist(s), just for the release itself.
That makes sense! This dump has a really reasonable system behind it. Thank you for your answer!
And.. is there any way to know date_created, rather than last_updated, of artist, release, and so on? Quite some people will be interested only in the time some artist/release/track has been added to musicbrainz, rather than the time that merely birthdate of some artist has been edited.
Not directly. You would need to find the edit that created the entity, in the edit table (which is huge and covered by a different license, so it’s separate from the main data dump).