Author: ruaok

Schema change release tomorrow at 1700UTC

Tomorrow, Monday 14 October, 2013, 17:00 UTC (10:00 PDT, 13:00 EDT, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST) we’re going to release our next round of schema changes!

As it is typical with our fall schema changes, this one is a little simpler and more focused on cleanup, rather than massive new changes. This gives me hope that we will have smoother release than we did in the spring. 🙂

We’re going to make the site read-only and run off our backup database server while we upgrade our primary database server. I suspect that we should be in read-only mode for about an hour. The exact start time is not quite known — we’ll start our release process at 17:00 UTC, but when we go to read-only is hard to tell. We’ll tweet and give a shout in IRC when we’re ready.

Changes for upcoming schema change release: 2013-10-14

For our fall schema change release we’re going to fix the issues listed in this Schema change, 2013-10-14 fix version. This schema change, much like our previous fall schema changes, is going to be a little lighter than our spring changes. The two big changes that you should be aware of are:

  • MBS-6046: Remove PUID support. PUIDs have been deprecated for quite some time in favor of using AcoustID. This change completes our switchover to AcoustID.
  • MBS-6068: Remove _name tables. With NGS we introduced tables that isolated all of the name strings for a given table, in order to reduce duplicate strings in our database. Sadly, this proved to be more pain that gain, so we’re going to remove them. This will make writing queries for our schema much easier. Sadly, this means that if you use the MusicBrainz database directly, (as opposed to using our Web Service, which we recommend) then you will likely need to update your SQL queries.

The rest of the changes will have a much smaller impact: Adding a disambiguation column for areas, adding places, and adding the ability to mark a relationship as deprecated. We’re also making some minor changes to our non-replicated tables that will not be visible to our Live Data Feed users, but are more convenient to make during a schema change.

The scheduled date for this release is Monday, 14th October, 2013.

Our RDFa dilemma

A few years ago Queen Mary University was awarded a grant to implement modern RDF support in MusicBrainz. The RDFa portion was implemented on our server and has been in our pages for quite some time.

However, the code to implement RDFa is brittle and has not been maintained through a number of schema changes and is quite broken at this point in time. When wondering if we should fix this or remove it, we could find no one or no application that we know of, that makes use of the embedded RDFa in our pages. And no one stepped up to fix it and the author of this code is not responding to emails inquiring about this.

At this point, we’re ready to remove the broken code from our pages in an effort to remove technical debt that has accumulated over the past few years. If you care about RDFa support in our pages, please speak up now. Ideally anyone speaking up would also volunteer to adopt the RDFa code and see it through life as our schema changes.

We’re going to take the HTTPS plunge!

Yesterday in our dev meeting we agreed to take the HTTPS plunge for all of our web site traffic in as little as 2 weeks time. This means that all web site traffic (not the web service) will be served over HTTPS; if you visit any MusicBrainz HTTP URL (e.g. http://musicbrainz.org ) you will be redirected to the equivalent HTTPS URL (e.g. https://musicbrainz.org ). This will not be applied to our web services, you’ll still be able to access those with HTTP. However, we do encourage all of our web service users to make use of HTTPS when possible.

We have one bug to address before we make this switch. And if we can find a sufficient fix for this in time, we’re going to make the HTTPS switch on 16 September 2013. If we can’t find an acceptable fix, we’ll have to postpone this switchover.

If for some reason you can see that switching all web site traffic to HTTPS is a bad idea, please leave us a comment ASAP.

New MusicBrainz EU download mirror

With the help of Freso and then generous support from Denmark based open source hosting provider dotsrc.org the MusicBrainz downloads (data and apps) are now available in the EU (FTP too!).

This should make data downloads quite a bit faster than trying to download them across a trans-atlantic link.

Thank you very much to the folks at dotsrc.org for setting this up and hosting it and for Freso for making this connection!

Search server release: 2013-08-14

Paul Taylor worked on the latest release of our search server — thanks for fixing these bugs, Paul! The following issues were addressed:

Release Notes – MusicBrainz Search Server – Version 2013-08-14

Bug

  • [SEARCH-306] – Advanced search can’t find areas by alias
  • [SEARCH-315] – REGRESSION:Recording index is not outputting Release artist credit when different to recoridng artist credit (i.e. Various Artist)

Google donates another $40,000

We’ve just received our annual sponsorship from Google’s Open Source Programs Office to the tune of $40,000. Thanks so much for continuing to sponsor us, Google!

At the current count we’ve received nearly a quarter million dollars from Google’s Open Source Programs Office, which is truly amazing. Thanks for all your support, it clearly makes a big difference in our operations!

New virtual machine available via BitTorrent

We have finally created a new version of our Virtual Machine and we’re currently seeding it via BitTorrent. If you have some spare bandwidth and would like to help seed this torrent, please join it and leave your client running.

You can find the torrent file here. (edit: for the curious/disk-limited, the downloaded .ova is 10.13GB). Please read the instructions for how to use this VM.

You should consider this VM as beta quality as it not been tested at all. Let’s hope for the best!

UPDATE: We’ve got a workaround for getting this VM to work in VirtualBox. It works just fine under VMWare Fusion and Player.

UPDATE 2: We’ve added a second tracker to the BitTorrent.

MusicBrainz Summit 13: Berlin, Germany 21 & 22 September 2013

After we were not able to confirm space in our previously agreed city, we started looking for alternative places to host our summit and Wikimedia Germany in Berlin graciously agreed to host us!

This means that we’re going to hold our annual MusicBrainz summit at Wikimedia Germany in Berlin on September 21 and 22. However, please note that space is limited to 20 people, so if you’re interested in attending, please sign up as soon as you can!

Please take a look at the summit wiki page and then add yourself to the appropriate places in that page if you’d like to come.

I’m looking forward to seeing familiar and new faces!

EU FTP mirror wanted

The OSU Open Source Lab hosts our FTP site in the US (thanks!!), but downloading from it from the EU is quite slow. We’re wondering if anyone would be interested in setting up an FTP mirror that is located in the EU? Sadly, we have no idea what sorts of bandwidth would be required for this, but we’re currently using less than 50GB of disk space.

If you’re interested, please leave a comment. Thanks!