Author: ruaok

May 14 schema change release time

The schema change release is approaching fast and we’re making good progress taking care of all the tasks that need to be completed. During yesterday’s meeting we agreed on the time to do this release: 14 May 1600UTC (9am PDT, 11am Chicago, 17h BST, 18h CEST, timezone map).

We will start the release process at this time — the exact time when the site will be down will depend on how long it will take us to walk through our pre-release checklist. We will be announcing the exact downtime via Twitter (@musicbrainz) and via a banner on the main MusicBrainz pages.

We expect our downtime to be somewhere between 15-30 minutes.

Thanks!

Summer of Code: We’ve accepted these projects

I’m pleased to announce the following 5 projects were accepted for this round of Summer of Code:

  • A new website for Picard and its plugins by Shadab Zafar: Give Picard a new website that will be used to host everything Picard related especially its plugins. Also add an interface which can be used to download those plugins right from picard.
  • MBS-6201: Add an “event” entity by reosarevok: Finalising the basic implementation of MBS-799 by adding an event entity to MusicBrainz.
  • Finishing and deploying CritiqueBrainz by Roman Tsukanov: Last year Maciej Czerwiński started work on repository for Creative Commons-licensed reviews – CritiqueBrainz project. He implemented core functionality: storage, API, and web interface. During Google Summer of Code 2014 I’d like to continue his work, finish and deploy the project.
  • MB UI TLC by navap: Spend some major TLC on all the templates and UI of MB.
  • Move MusicBrainz Search to SOLR by Wieland Hoffmann: The goal of this project is to move the MusicBrainz Search server to use SOLR for faster and in-place index updates.

The whole MusicBrainz dev team is very excited to have students take on these projects. We’ve been waiting for events for an eternity and after 9 months of no progress, I’m stoked that soon we will release CritiqueBrainz.

Congratulations to mineo, navap, duffer, gentlecat and reosarevok. And big thanks to Google for having us in Summer of Code again.

Phew: MusicBrainz is unaffected by the Heartbleed fiasco

As you’ve probably heard all over the net, a vulnerability was found in a very popular and critical piece of software that a lot of sites on the net use. While we also use said piece of software, our version is a bit older and therefore we’re not affected by this bug. There is no need to change your password, unless you use a common password on any of these affected sites listed in the link above.

To get an idea of how serious this issue is, take a look at this stunning list of affected sites!

But, don’t take our word for it. Use this link to check to see if musicbrainz.org is affected.

Now go and change your passwords. NOW!

More details for our 2014-05-15 schema change release

As promised last week, here is a more detailed explanation of what is going to be changing during our May 15th schema change release:

  • [MBS-5978] – Replication feed is missing release_tag: This will not change any database tables but will finally include release_tag data in our Live Data Feed.
  • [MBS-6709] – "None" is no longer the last Packaging type after adding Book and Cassette Case: See below for more details.
  • [MBS-2410] – Label types not a tree anymore: This bug and MBS-6709 add “parent”, “child_order” and “description” columns to all of the yellow tables on this diagram except for language, script and script_language.
  • [MBS-2714] – Add support for Series: Details are provided in the ticket itself.
  • [MBS-6144] – Remove the apparently-unused script_language table: Exactly what it says on the tin.
  • [MBS-6602] – Remove sortnames from areas: Removes the sortname column from the area table.
  • [MBS-6603] – Remove sortnames from labels: Removes the sortname column from the label table.
  • [MBS-6651] – Make it possible to disable dates for relationship types: Adds a “has_dates” boolean column to link_type, to indicate whether a particular relationship type allows dates or not. The upgrade will set them all to “can have dates” for now and we will manually disable the appropriate ones later.
  • [MBS-7205] – Link types should track assumed cardinality: Details are provided in the ticket itself.
  • [MBS-3674] – Make instruments entities: This adds the following tables: instrument, instrument_type, instrument_gid_redirect, instrument_alias, instrument_alias_type, instrument_annotation, edit_instrument, l_*_instrument, l_instrument_* (the usual AR tables to other entities).

Next schema change release: May 15, 2014

As per our twice a year schedule of making schema changes that impact our Live Data Feed users, I’d like to announce the set of tickets that we’re going to implement for the next release.

We have quite a few clean-up tickets in this batch and a handful of improvements — some of the improvements are a lot of work, but won’t seem that way on the surface. However, the one major new feature we’re going to add are Series. Series will allow us to mark a set of releases as belonging to a series (e.g. Now this is what I call crappy music!). This has been a long long requested feature and we’re finally at a point where we can implement this.

The good news about this release is that a large number of the tickets are already implemented! The big tickets are still in progress, but the smaller ones are already in review. We’re hoping that we’ll have a less hasty push to the finish line this year with lots of time for testing. And we’re hoping for ponies too! 🙂

LinkedBrainz: Alive and well!

Barry Norton has been a star and has created and hosted RDF dumps of the MusicBrainz data and also established a permanent SPARQL endpoint for our data on linkedbrainz.org.

The timing of this is perfect, because our next release will remove the RDFa from our pages. Proper RDF data and a SPARQL end-point are the best ways to move forward with MusicBrainz data in the context of linked open data.

This gives the MusicBrainz development team the freedom to focus on making MusicBrainz better while leaving the nitty gritty parts of making our data friendly to the linked open data hackers to experts like Barry.

Thanks so much for making this happen, Barry!

Our embedded RDFa will be going away in two weeks

We’ve been trying to find anyone making use of the RDFa embedded in our pages, but we’ve been unable to find anyone.

Given that the RDFa makes our templates much harder and cumbersome to edit, we’ve decided to go ahead and remove our RDFa support in two weeks time.

Since we could not find anyone who actually uses our RDFa, this shouldn’t be a problem. But we suspect that someone, somewhere will be angry with us for removing the RDFa support without any warning or without being asked for feedback. :-/

All MusicBrainz sites downtime

On Sunday, December 29th at 1pm PST, (2pm AZ, 4pm EST, 9pm UK, 10pm CET) we’re going to swap out our network switch. During this time all MusicBrainz sites hosted in California will be unavailable. (that is all sites, save for the primary and secondary FTP mirrors and the FreeDB gateway).

The work will not start exactly at 1pm, but we’re doing to start executing our plan at 1pm. The exact time for the outage will be announced via Twitter and via the banner on musicbrainz.org

We hope that this outage will last only 10-15 minutes, but as these things typically go, you’ll never know how long it will really take.

Sorry for the inconvenience.