[MUD-Dev] World Persistence, flat files v/s DB v/s ??

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 22 Mar 98 at 10:29, Chris Gray wrote:
> [Ben Greear:]
> 
> :The two things I'm pondering now are binary flat files (one per object,
> :a collection of objects?? I dunno) or a database.
> 
> A binary form has the distinct advantage that it is relatively easy to
> replace a single entity in the file. With text files, variations in
> formatting of things like numbers make that harder. If you need to save
> more than one kind of thing in your file (fairly likely!), then you can:
> 
>     - have multiple files, one per type of entity
> 	[can be expensive in terms of file handles and space]
>     - reserve portions of the file for arrays of the different entities
> 	[what happens if you overflow a portion, needing more space?]
>     - set up means by which varying lengths and types of things can be
> 	interspersed in the file, and properly found and updated.
> 	[can get complicated]
> 
> The third choice is pretty close to writing your own DB system.
>

A fourth choice is using a already written DB package.

Oracle, Watcom, Informix, Progress, M-SQL, DB2, YOODA, Texas 
persitant store, etc.

If you're using JDBC you should be able to connect to a number of 
pre-existing DBs and mix and match til you get one that performs the 
way you want.   

Myself.  I'm using an ODBC-compliant interface and have plugged three 
different DBs into the backend with relative ease.  I'm also looking 
at TDBM though I would need to rewrite the translation layer to fake
ODBC-compliance.

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