Author: mwiencek

Schema change release: May 19, 2025

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MusicBrainz is announcing a new schema change release set for May 19, 2025. Erratum: Search upgrades will shortly follow it. Like most of our recent schema changes, it should have little or no impact to downstream users.

There is one change to a major replicated table worth mentioning upfront: the medium table will have a new gid column added. If you’re running custom SQL queries against the database that join the medium table at all, there is a small chance you could run into errors like ERROR: column reference "gid" is ambiguous if you’re not properly qualifying the columns being selected.

We’re also altering some columns on the artist_release and artist_release_group tables (see below for more details). These are materialized tables used by our website on the back-end to speed up certain pages; you should normally not be accessing them directly, but it’s worth mentioning just in case. These tables do exist on mirrors, but are only populated with data if you’ve run admin/BuildMaterializedTables before.

Besides replacing some functions/triggers, you generally shouldn’t have to worry about any other database breaking changes in this release.

Finally, here is the complete list of scheduled tickets:

Database schema

The following tickets change the database schema in some way.

  • MBS-9253: List EP release groups above singles on artist pages. A small change to the get_artist_release_group_rows function is required in order to be able to change the sorting of release groups to prioritize EPs over singles. The function will be changed to depend on the type’s child_order (which can be safely changed at any time) rather than its id for sorting. While this function exists on mirrors, the function change shouldn’t have any impact on them directly (but a change of the child_order of the types will affect the sorting for display on mirrors as well). We’ll be adding new triggers to the release_group_primary_type and release_group_secondary_type tables to run the function when the tables change – these triggers will also exist on mirrors.
  • MBS-13322: Race condition when removing unused URLs. A rare internal error can occur in one of our trigger functions that cleans up unused URLs. We’ll replace that function, delete_unused_url, updating it to avoid a “race condition” whereby a URL can become used again the moment before it’s deleted. This will have no impact on mirrors, as delete_unused_url is only invoked by triggers that don’t exist on mirrors.
  • MBS-13464: Inconsistent sorting of artist release/release group titles. In the May 2021 schema change, we added some new materialized tables to significantly speed up the loading of artists’ release and release group listings: the not-so-surprisingly named artist_release and artist_release_group tables. These work by efficiently indexing an artist’s releases and release groups by date and other attributes, and then finally by their titles. Except for efficiency reasons, we originally decided to only store the first character of the titles for sorting. That predictably leads to incorrect sorting in certain cases, like with undated live bootlegs, as shown in MBS-13464. After measuring the actual size impact, we’ve decided to update the artist_release and artist_release_group tables to replace their sort_character columns with name columns that store the complete titles.
  • MBS-13768 – Add MBIDs to mediums. Adds a gid column to the medium table, and a new medium_gid_redirect table. It generates MBIDs for existing mediums that will be replicated to mirrors.
  • MBS-13832: Also support PDF files in CAA / EAA index_listing (for is_front purposes). PDF files are never treated as front for cover art archive purposes, probably because they originally did not have PNG thumbnails generated by the Internet Archive. That changed quite a while ago though, and there seems to be no reason to single them out anymore. We will just replace the index_listing views for cover_art_archive and event_art_archive with ones amended to not filter out PDF files.

    Note: Databases created before schema 25 (2017) may be missing filesize columns from their cover_art_archive.index_listing view (MBS-14014). This upgrade will add those columns. Since this view is for internal use, and these columns already exist on databases created in the past 8 years, we believe this shouldn’t pose any real compatibility issue.
  • MBS-13964: Some recordings are missing a first release date. A bug was discovered that causes recordings to sometimes have incorrect first-release-date values if any of the releases they’re attached to are merged with the “append” strategy. We’ll be adding a new trigger to the medium table that updates recording_first_release_date properly when such merges occur. Note that since recording_first_release_date is a materialized table, this trigger will also run on mirrors; that way it’s kept up-to-date even after running admin/BuildMaterializedTables initially.
  • MBS-13966: Release group first release dates need to be recalculated. Another (unrelated) issue with “first release date” information, but this time with release groups rather than recordings. We’ve found that a very small percentage of release groups’ first release dates (as stored in the release_group_meta table and returned in the web service) are wrong; it’s uncommon, but one way this can occur is when all releases in a release group are moved out of it. To address this, we’ll update the set_release_group_first_release_date function, which will have the exact same signature as before. We’ll also run a script to rebuild the incorrect data.

Erratum: This list originally included MBS-13965: Extend entity attribute schema to mediums – until we realized this was actually already done eight years ago. Isn’t time weird.

Update 2025-05-02: MBS-13966 was moved to this section, because we found out that a function needs to be updated to fix the underlying issue.

Update 2025-05-08: MBS-14014 has been fixed and mentioned as part of MBS-13832 above.

Search indexes

Erratum: Solr 9 will be made available for mirrors in a separate release.

Data corrections to the recording_first_release_date and release_group_meta tables do affect indexed recording and release group data respectively. If you have live search indexing enabled, those changes should be propagated to the search indexes automatically. Otherwise, you will have to perform a full reindex of those entities’ search indexes.

We’ll post upgrade instructions for standalone/mirror servers on the day of the release. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or on the relevant above-linked tickets.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-11-18

Image editing has been re-enabled after being down for the past month, so it’s now time to upload your backlog of scanned artwork if you haven’t already done so on the beta site! The rest of the changelog is short, but we’ll give a special mention to JadedBlueEyes, whose GSoC project is now being used for sending emails between editors. You’ll notice that a newer, fancier email template is now used for such messages. We hope to convert the rest of the emails we send out to use the new service soon, in future server releases.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to derat and JadedBlueEyes for having contributed to the code. Thanks to Xythium, jlks82, and roman412 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ApeKattQuest/MonkeyPython, KenParker_CN, and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-11-18.0.

Continue reading “MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-11-18”

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-08-12

Today’s release features some new edit search conditions, minor editing improvements, and refactoring related to editor privileges. We also now fancily display recent event artwork additions on the homepage. ✨

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

  • Thanks to derat for fixing a guess case annoyance related to the roman numeral “MIX” (MBS-12523).
  • Thanks to julian45 for fixing another special case of e-onkyo links (PR #3335).
  • Thanks to danBLOO, santiagofn, jesus2099, and chaban for having reported bugs and suggested improvements.
  • Thanks to ApeKattQuest/MonkeyPython, outsidecontext, brtc, koukei07, mfmeulenbelt, nkm01, weeeeei, wileyfoxyx, and xiaole_0714223 for updating the translations.
  • And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-08-12.0.

Continue reading “MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-08-12”

Downtime today for PostgreSQL / MusicBrainz schema change upgrade: 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7pm CEST)

Today (Monday, May 13) at 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7:00pm CEST), we’ll be:

  • Upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v16.
  • Performing the MusicBrainz schema change upgrade.

See the previous announcement on this topic for more information.

Expect MusicBrainz and services that depend on its database (MetaBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, CritiqueBrainz, BookBrainz) to be down for the hour, but we’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible.

Afterward, we’ll post instructions here on how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server (whether using musicbrainz-docker or otherwise).

P.S. The initially announced upgrades for MusicBrainz search engine are just about to reach our beta website, and thus are postponed for mirrors too.

MusicBrainz Server mirror-only fix update, 2023-10-24

If you are running a mirror, you may have seen replication packet #162718 fail to apply with the following error:

Failed query:
'INSERT INTO musicbrainz.tag (id, name, ref_count) VALUES (?, ?, ?)'
(259975 girl group 0)
23505 DBD::Pg::st execute failed: ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "tag_idx_name"
DETAIL: Key (name)=(girl group) already exists. [for Statement "INSERT INTO musicbrainz.tag (id, name, ref_count) VALUES (?, ?, ?)" with ParamValues: 1='259975', 2='girl group', 3='0']

This occurs because the index tag_idx_name was temporarily corrupted in production after yesterday’s database switchover, due to an ICU collation version mismatch. This allowed people to enter tags with duplicate names.

Since then we’ve fixed the broken packets, and published the fixed versions.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

The git tag is v-2023-10-24-hotfix.

Notes

  • If you encountered the error above, you’ll have a “previously aborted load,” and must update your MusicBrainz Server to v-2023-10-24-hotfix. After that, replication should operate smoothly without any further action being needed.
  • If you haven’t replicated up to packet #162718 yet, then no action is needed.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We’re improving our database upgrade process to always rebuild indexes using ICU collations.

Fixed Bug

  • [MBS-13333] – Replication is blocked by tag duplicates

Schema change release: May 15, 2023

MusicBrainz is announcing a new schema change release for May 15, 2023. The actual schema (database) changes we’ve detailed below shouldn’t have much perceivable impact on mirror servers, especially if you only use the web service; most are to remove unused tables/columns or tweak how certain tables are materialized.

Continue reading “Schema change release: May 15, 2023”