[MUD-Dev] Databases (was Re: Commercial-use Restrictions on Code Bases)

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2000 17:06:02 -0500 
Charles Hughes <charles.hughes at bigfoot.com> wrote:

> At the risk of being slapped by a mackerel, who here really thinks
> they can do a better database design than those afforded by the
> likes of the free or commercial databases?   

Narrow the question to:

  "Who here thinks they can do a better database for their
application than those afforded by the likes of the free or
commercial databases?"

and you have a very different question as of a sudden you are
bringing the areas of purpose and loading into the question.

MUDs often (depending on design) make unusual demands on their
backing stores.  As a very simple case in point, if you are running
a runtime morphic system, there are ___NO___ commercial, OpenSource,
or CloseSource DB's which really even attempt to handle this area as
a DB.

There's also a seperate question that comes in here:  

  What is your purpose and goal in writing your server/DB?

For me a large part of the process is the educational and test case
opportunities it avails.  Others are have different goals, and
different trade-offs they are willing to accept.

> It seems to me that segregating the database issues and then
> simply using a database is far better than creating a new one.

This really depends onw hat you are trying to do.  Murkle, in its
more recent forms, was an investigation of multi-threading issues
and an entertaining chance to teach myself the area.  As far as the
DB is concerned, Murkle is a proof-of-concept for the lockless DB
concept, as well as an implementation base for various OO ideas I
want to play with and how to represent and manipulate them in the
DB.

> This would change the "databases/memory management" division above
> into two divisions - database usage, memory management.

For many cases, especially giving the cacheing and predictive
algorithms that many DB's implement, the distinction between Db and
memory is rather artificial.  

Consider the case where your DB cache is as large or larger than
your DB...IS there really any distinction any more at all, or merely
a lot of extra overhead and processing for something that is not
needed...

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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