Databases in games

I'm going to make an educated guess: I don't think that they would use a second server for database connections, as it would have some major overhead as well as being a significant bottleneck. My guess is that they either use a custom solution, or a database library like BerkeleyDB which may or may not have been optimized to their needs.

EVE uses MS SQL server, and the important tables all in solid-state "disks".

Most seems to be using SQL based servers, probably Oracle..

There was a very interesting topic about this a while back.. One of the comments in the thread was something like "The only game I've worked on that has never suffered from database problems, is the only game I've worked on that didn't use an SQL database, and that is ultima online", except I'm not sure about UO.. There was also a comment saying something like "the reason for all these database problems is that some unseasoned developers think you can throw anything at oracle and expect it to handle it gracefully"..

If I were you, I'd search for that topic, it was interesting..

If I recall correctly, after the catastrophic WoW meltdown (due to total overloading of the database servers), Blizzard posted job ads for Oracle technicians. So presumably they're using Oracle for WoW.

Ahh, so the big ones do you use a 'typical' database after all.

After a bit more searching i found this DevMaster Link which has a table of advantages and disadvantages of using Database's vs Flat Files. Never even thought about using flat files, but now that i think about it, it makes pretty good sense. As long as you don't want to run complex reports on the data that is.

Cheers,
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