We will retire our public database instances for Ensembl releases 24 to 47 in April 2022. These databases can be hosted locally using our new Docker container.
As part of our periodic infrastructure review, we will be retiring our public databases for releases 24 to 47 on the 22nd April 2022. The retired servers and associated databases can be found in the following table:
| Databases hosted | Server | Port |
| Ensembl core, variation, regulation, compara | ensembldb.ensembl.org | 4306 |
| BioMart | martdb.ensembl.org | 3316 |
These databases remain accessible from our FTP site as flat-file compressed dumps and can be hosted in our newly developed MySQLv4 container. Instructions on how to run this container using Docker and Singularity are available from the associated documentation. This container includes scripts to simplify downloading these databases from our FTP site, checking data integrity and loading into a running MySQL v4 server. All associated code can be accessed from our GitHub repository.
The Ensembl project offers public MySQL servers as part of our program of API support and enabling researchers to perform custom SQL queries against our hosted data. Decisions around resource retirement is governed by a number of factors, with usage, which we have found to be exceptionally low for these servers, being a significant component of that process.
Similar reviews are now ongoing for our database structure from release 48 onwards and any outcomes will be published here.