which dbms is suitable for a mmorpg game server?

Question

which dbms is suitable for a mmo rpg game server?

Answer 1

If you plan on having many players online, I would say you should pick one that can swallow writes as fast as possible.

If you think about it, you probably don't want to keep loading data from the database on every little action, so you probably need to keep everything you need in memory. Memory will thus always be consistent, and you just need to persist actions to ensure people don't lose their progress, etc.

Of course, you need to load data into memory when things change a lot (raid zoning into raid instance, or whatever), but after that you probably don't want to keep accessing a database.

This might be the reason why many servers have split up their game world into separate instances so that they can place all the players in one instance together on one server, but another instance is on another server.

Mind you, I don't have any experience designing MMORPG games, so it's just plain guesswork.

Answer 2

The MMO Eve-Online, which is one of the largest "single instance" game worlds uses MS SQL Server & some funky hardware.
If you poke about in the Dev Blogs section there are some articles relating to their architecture.

Answer 3

I doubt the choice of DB will itself be a deal breaker - although you'll want to pick something that has a solid pedigree (MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL perhaps).

Of greater importance will be the data architecture; how you partition the data, etc.