I don't know if anyone noticed, but at the DAoC postmortem it says they went with MySQL and if I read the article right they used the free version.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020213/firor_02.htm

[edited by - usser on July 25, 2003 9:55:44 AM]

DAoC does not use mySQL for game storage. They use "flatfiles" I have no earthly idea what these are so im not gonna comment

Could be memory mapped files. Windows support functionality to assign a file to its virtual mem space, effectivly creating a simple but effective persistant data structure. It should be ok, even in an event of a crash as windows manages the file and should write out the cached data upon exit.

-ddn

''flat file'' typically refers to a sequential binary file. For instance write ten structures (1 through 10)out to disk, in order. When you need to read in number 7, you seek to (7 * sizeof(structure)) to read in the correct data. This lacks some of the cool features available in using a RDBMS, but it is relocatable to the extent that you spread your ''database'' processing from one system to whatever systems actually need the data.

We use a similar concept in our current project.