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Level 10 Troll
“Pain in the ASCII”
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Evil Trout Posted:
TORNBUG Posted:
Seerow Posted:
Tables for databases might not work the same way, but I wouldn’t think that the storage would be that much different that it would cause problems. Though it might be a less efficient use of space, which could be your bigger priority until you get better servers.
Databases don’t work that way. You can’t have tables with subtables. The only data format that really supports that sort of thing is XML, which is really bad in just about every other way.
20-30 tables for character data does seem a bit ridiculous though.
Sometimes simple-seeming things are more complicated underneath.
I just counted and there are up to 22 tables carrying data for any particular user. Two of them are purely statistical, basically acting as logs so they needn’t be counted.
The rest are all necessary, and I couldn’t imagine de-normalizing them without losing some major functionality.
Remember a character belongs to many things: missions, bookmarks, friends, tubmails, inventory items, upgrades, abilities, deliveries, contacts, hints, cinematics, toolbar customization, etc. Those are the most obvious ones that come to mind from the front end, but I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine how a role playing game such as this can rely on a lot of relational data Log in to see images!
Ehh.. I guess I could see it if you just have a relation table for every one of those things. Seems like some of them could be handled by a bit flag type construct, or just a varchar string of values, if you were interested in reducing the number of tables anyhow. Probably isn’t a big deal if you aren’t encountering performance problems though.
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