Question

I am using the sqlite3 library of python to process a Wikipedia .sql data dump, and I get the following “syntax error” report:

sqlite3.OperationalError: no such table: categorylinks

Below are the steps I have taken to import the .sql into my database

import sqlite3
con = sqlite3.connect('wikicategories.db')
infile = open('enwiki-latest-categorylinks.sql')
str = infile.read()
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute(str)

and the beginning of the .sql file looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `categorylinks` (
  `cl_from` int(8) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `cl_to` varbinary(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `cl_sortkey` varbinary(230) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `cl_timestamp` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  `cl_sortkey_prefix` varbinary(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `cl_collation` varbinary(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `cl_type` enum('page','subcat','file') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'page',
  UNIQUE KEY `cl_from` (`cl_from`,`cl_to`),
  KEY `cl_timestamp` (`cl_to`,`cl_timestamp`),
  KEY `cl_collation` (`cl_collation`),
  KEY `cl_sortkey` (`cl_to`,`cl_type`,`cl_sortkey`,`cl_from`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=binary;

I really didn’t see any problem with the int(8) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT part. And this file is released by wikipedia hence should be ready to use. I know that the Python sqlite3 has a slightly different implementation w.r.t MySQL. Does it have something to do with this?

Answer 1

This is not SQL as understood by SQLite. Loading it with sqlite3 produces an error.

% sqlite3 < enwiki-latest-categorylinks.sql
Error: near line 1: near "unsigned": syntax error

This has nothing to do with Python.

You have two options:

1. Import the SQL file with MySQL.
2. Convert it to SQL that SQLite can understand.