Dear Wikibase/Wikidata Community,

We are trying to understand which database technologies and strategies 
Wikibase/Wikidata uses for storing, updating, and querying the data (knowledge) 
it manipulates.

By looking at the 
documentation<https://wmde.github.io/wikidata-wikibase-architecture/assets/img/03-dataflow-out.drawio.17c12ee9.svg>
 we understood that RDF is only used for the Wikidata Query Service, but we 
could not find out exactly how Wikibase/Wikidata stores the information that is 
translated to RDF during the data dump.

More specifically, we understood that a MySQL (or is it MariaDB?) relational 
database is used as the key persistence component for most of Wikibase/Wikidata 
services and that the information that is maintained in this database is 
periodically exported to multiple formats, including RDF.

In addition, looking at the relational database schema published in the 
documentation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout> we could 
not locate tables that are easily mappable to the Wikibase Data 
Model<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel>.
Thus, we hypothesize that there is some software component (Wikibase Common 
Data Access?) that dynamically translates the data contained in those tables to 
Statements, Entities, etc. Is that hypothesis, correct?
If yes, does this software component uses any intermediate storage mechanism 
for caching those Statements, Entities, ...? Or are those translations always 
performed at runtime on-the-fly (be it for querying, adding, or updating 
Statements, Entities, …)?

Finally, we would like to understand more about how Wikidata REST 
API<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:REST_API> is implemented:

•         In which database are the statements that added/retrieved through it 
stored? Is it being stored in the central MySQL database or in another database?

•         Does it have any support for pagination of statements? For example, 
if an item has many statements associated with a property, does the API assumes 
that both the underlying database and the network will support the retrieval of 
all those statements?

•         Are you currently considering implementing the support for more 
flexible querying of statements, or such requirement has been fully delegated 
to the Wikidata Query Service?

If there is an updated documentation that could help us answer those questions, 
could you kindly point us to it? Otherwise, would you be able to share this 
information with us?

Best Regards,



Elton F. de S. Soares
Advisory Software Engineer
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
IBM Research
E-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>


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