[MUD-Dev] Re: Databases

[Laurent Bossavit]

[On databases in general]

I wouldn't use MySQL - the fastest SQL database around - for a MUD. 
It's optimized for ultra-frequent fetches of small to medium large 
chunks of information; our databases services 50 queries/sec and 
about a quarter of a gigabyte. It all fits on one (admittedly beefed 
up) machine. But I wouldn't use any of the "big" databases either; 
they are optimized to scale to terabytes of data, with robustness and 
consistency of the data given much higher priority than performance.

Fact is, I wouldn't consider using an SQL database for a M* type 
application; it's too much of a pain to map SQL records to the object 
oriented data used in most such software. My wish would be for a 
native XML data store, with the ease of use and top-notch performance 
of MySQL, and a query language as useful and usable as SQL. This 
would be perfect for a MUD, and in fact many other types of 
applications - with a good XML database you don't need SQL, you don't 
need an OODBMS (XML-Data bindings do the OO part, the data store does 
the dirty work), you don't need much of anything. Unfortunately there 
isn't such a thing out there yet.

Sigh.


-[Morendil]-
Disk crash in progress - tagline service interrupted.




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