[MUD-Dev] Re: Databases: was Re: skill system

[s001gmu at nova.wright.edu]

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, T. Alexander Popiel wrote:

> In message:  <9193945826E7D0118BB4080009DBF8F611737D at TTECH>
>              jacob langthorn <jlangthorn at towertechinc.com> writes:
> >
> >	Has any one tried using Orical or SQL to manage the data base
> >for the mud? If so what sorta luck did you have?
> 
> Yes.  David Passmore and Lydia Leong did an experiment with MUSH,
> trying to run it off of one of the SQL engines.  They found that
> it dramatically increased the speed of global searches, but increased
> the time to get stuff like the list of local objects by an order of
> magnitude.

We're working on using either CQL++ (if they will ever get back to me!
grumble) or mSQL for our DB back end.  I was unaware of specific
examples of previous attempts, but knew that SQL seemed a bit kludgy for a
lot of the smaller scale data access that goes on in a mud.  As such, the
DB is probably going to be used mainly for cold storage, world
persistance, etc.  Most of the data that is used often will be cached into
memory and manipulated there.  The downside to that approach is that we
have to deal with data consistancy issues, etc.

Did they write anything about the MUSH DB expiriement, btw?  I'd love to
get my hands on any documents they produced.

JC uses an OO DB, but not a pre-packaged one, if I recall.  There has been
a lot of discussion about OO DBs in the past, and some minor discussion
about RDBs.

-Greg