Panshun
Raw Edge
O X I D E
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Posted - 2007.08.06 11:41:00 -
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Edited by: Panshun on 06/08/2007 11:41:44
As someone rightly pointed out in another thread, if you think about the architecture and database requirements of this game they aren't really that massive in todays terms. In short, I'm pretty sure that technically MS SQL Server can cope. Most of the entities in the model are going to be static tables, very few are going to be massively hit live tables. Not saying that there aren't a large number of transactions, but as they're probably only going to be a few entities involved with those it's not going to be beyond the ken of a reasonable systems designer to tweak/tune and partition the hell out of said tables. Market, ship positions/status maybe being the largest, and there are so many ways to skin those requirements it's pretty much an exercise in futile intellectual ************ to even try guessing how CCP have modelled those.
The only possible 'omg! your using MS SQL wah!' I can raise is it's stability and scalability. I spent most of the end of my career (yep, I've quit IT now, feels good) designing Data Warehouses which start around a terabyte in size and grow from there, mostly on MMP hardware. I used Oracle extensively , because its the most stable and scalable/distributable. I don't think eve needs anywhere near the kind of performance in database terms of your average large scale business app. For example, way back I was one of the designers for the trading backbone of the London Stock Exchange, now that was a massive OLTP system really. What effected the 'what database platform ?' decision there was what would run on the fault tolerant boxes, and what would let us design an effective and elegant method of getting that amount of transactions moved around quickly enough. This was Oracle again, but none of the core tools were built using any of the Oracle development products. Eve isn't going to be anywhere near that level of throughput requirement anytime soon.
Using Oracle for eve would to me be a serious financial fail, looking at the hardware architecture CCP have the costs would be silly high considering Oracles pricing model. Also, the cost of switching database, to any database (DB2 whatever) would be quite mad. Doing so would also possibly result in all manner of new problems too of course until things get resettled.
As it goes, the platform is never really that important in terms of performance as the main RDBMSs stand today. What is important though is the physical design of the database, thats where you get your performance, and you design based on whatever your platform does best tbh as well as common sense.
So, the only issue is stability, which you can sort out with redundancy, live backups, replication etc, etc. Dunno myself what you can do in MS SQL in that regard, but I've always found that hardware solutions are best there. For example I once had a couple of terabyte sized database being continuosly mirrored (hardware solution) once. I could switch to mirrored version simply by pressing a couple of buttons and point the RDBMS at the new instance (literally a few seconds work).
Basically, bashing MS SQL Server is pointless, as much as I personally hate the product I'm sure it's up to the job its being asked to do here.
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