[Coldstuff] SQL...

[Jon A. Lambert]

Brad Roberts wrote:
> 
> I have to rule (a) out as just unreasonably slow.  In (b), you'd still have
> a cache of some sort, since objects would stay for at least a short
> time frame (far far far shorter than in the existing code).  I haven't
> bothered to try b, though I did consider it briefly in a fit of insanity a
> while back (at least 3 years ago now). I actually did write a sql layer to
> replace the binarydb and lookup layers, definitely not taking any real
> advantage of the engine.  It wasn't too bad, since the cache still existed
> to insulate the speed hit.

Nods.  There are reasons to do it and take the performance hit.  
Reliability, transactional logging, rollback, and recovery, ease of 
archival.  It could also be done to get around some NDBM/GDM limitations.
But then as Bruce said even TEC hasn't really run up against these.
A lot depends on the RDBMS, as all are not created equal.  

You may know, but Edward may not, that these same SQL experiments 
have been done with Mush, LambaMOO and with Coolmud with similar 
performance results to yours.  

> Going back to the original question, I don't know if any of this has
> actually helped answer the question.  None of the stuff presented so far
> will give genesis or coldcore the magical ability for a user on one
> instance (assuming that multiple instances is achievable in the first
> place with any of the proposed sql or binarydb layer changes) to say "hi"
> to another user connected to another instance since that sort of data
> isn't passed through the database, its done directly from connection
> object to connection object in coldcore.

Again I agree.  You can use distributed database servers as a backend
but this doesn't give you a truely distributed mud server like Coolmud's 
YO protocol did (despite all it's warts).  

Distribution is great for applications that have loose functional 
coupling.  Finding that within say the ColdDark core or desiging a 
core with that in mind ain't easy.  One thing that does come to
mind focusing on ColdDark is distributing the Help or Web services.
It is worth it?  Probably not.  But that's assuming that all the 
users of Genesis are designing mud worlds.

--
--* Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD        Email:jlsysinc@ix.netcom.com *--
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