April 29th, 2008 Curt Monash
Truviso and EnterpriseDB announced today that there’s a Truviso “blade” for Postgres Plus. By email, EnterpriseDB Bob Zurek endorsed my tentative summary of what this means technically, namely:
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There’s data being managed transactionally by EnterpriseDB.
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Truviso’s DML has all along included ways to talk to a persistent Postgres data store.
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If, in addition, one wants to do stream processing things on the same data, that’s now possible, using Truviso’s usual DML.
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Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Complex event/stream processing (CEP), Data types, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Games and virtual worlds, Memory-centric data management, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Specialized data management in general, Truviso | 1 Comment »
June 12th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve just started a research project on the IT-like technology of games and virtual worlds, especially MMORPGs. My three recent posts on Guild Wars attracted considerable attention in GW’s community, and elicited some interesting commentary, especially for the revelation of Guild Wars’ very simple database architecture. Specifically, pretty much all character information is banged into a BLOB or two, and stored as a string of tokens, with little of the record-level detail one might expect. By way of contrast, Everquest is run on Oracle (and being transitioned to EnterpriseDB), at least one console-based game maker uses StreamBase, and so on.
Much of the attention has focused on the implications for the in-game economy – how can players buy and sell to their hearts’ content if there’s no transactional back-end. Frankly, I think that’s the least of the issues. For one thing, without a nice forms-based UI you probably won’t create enough transactions to matter, and integrating that into the game client isn’t trivial. For another, virtual items can be literally created and destroyed by the computer, with no negative effect on game play, a factor which drastically reduces the integrity burdens the game otherwise would face.
Rather, where I think the Guild Wars developers at ArenaNet may be greatly missing out is in the areas of business intelligence, data mining, and associated game control. Here are some examples of analyses they surely would find it helpful to do. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Application areas, Games and virtual worlds, Memory-centric data management, OLTP database management | No Comments »
June 9th, 2007 Curt Monash
I have the enviable task of researching online game and virtual world technology for an upcoming Network World column. My first interview, quite naturally, was with the lead developers of a game I actually play – Guild Wars. The overview is in another post; that may provide context for this one, which focuses on the database technology. (I also did a short post just on the implications for Guild Wars players.) It also has a brief description of what Guild Wars is – namely, a MMORPG (Massively MultiPlayer Role-Playing Game) with the unusual feature that most of the game world is instanced rather than utterly shared.
First, some scope. ArenaNet (Guild Wars’ developer, now a subsidiary of NCsoft) runs Microsoft SQL Server, mainly Enterprise Edition, having just switched to 2005 4 months ago. They run 1500-2500 transactions/second all day, spiking up to 5000 in their busiest periods. They have no full-time DBA, and when the developers started this project they didn’t know SQL. They’ve only had one major SQL Server failure in the 2+ years the game has been running, and that was (like most of their bugs) a network driver problem more than an issue with the core system.
As for what’s going on — there are a few different kinds of database things that happen in an instanced MMORPG. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Application areas, Games and virtual worlds, Microsoft and SQL*Server, OLTP database management | 11 Comments »
January 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB is attracting a bit of attention. Philip Howard, as he does of most products, takes a favorable view. Seth Grimes regards the company as dirty, rotten liars. The company suggests that Everquest gameplay* runs on an RDBMS. I find this inherently implausible, and hence am starting out with a skeptical view of the company’s marketing messages.
*As in character movement. The idea that character inventory is stored in an RDBMS I find vastly more credible. Ditto other less volatile aspects of character state.
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Posted in ANTs Software, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Games and virtual worlds, Mid-range DBMS, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 3 Comments »