SMW 1.8 released

Not sure if this is my last post for GSoC’12 but I am happy to announce that my contribution to Semantic MediaWiki over the summer as part of my Google Summer of Code project GreenSMW is now released as SMW 1.8 (http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki_1.8.0_released)

Overall this summer has been a life changing time for me, from being introduced to a new world of open source software to introducing others to the same. I also had the opportunity to give a talk on my work for SMW at the SMWCon in October (slides can be found at http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2012/Improvements_in_SQLStore3/Presentation). Later I attended the Wikipedia DevCamp and got to meet with lot of developers from WMF and other volunteers; its an amazing world out there. Hopefully, my contributions to open source continues like this forever 🙂

http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki_1.8.0_released

No more Useless Database Deletes and Inserts

SMW has been doing too many unnecessary deletes and inserts into your database lately and this has been worrying you too much? Don’t you worry about it now, I have wrote this little code (will link to it after the code cleanup day) that stops SMW from doing this behavior.

 

So what does this new SMW do? It will now check if something has changed for a page and only rewrite the values if something has really changed (Yes, it is just a small feature but look at some profiling data and you will see the difference it does). Here’s some information I gathered for a page with about 14 property-value tuples :

1. The newer version did about 14 less queries (including 1 update, 1 insert ,8 delete and remaining select queries).
2. Memory used by older version 38578056 and by newer version 36118576
3. Time taken by older version 774.183 and by newer version 753.942

 

Though, I don’t expect property-values to really change much in a wiki page but there will always be new additions, so I think that SMW must also check for each property one-by-one and perform updates rather than rewrite everything.

Will this happen? you will find out in another blog from me, till then have a good day 🙂