What database to use?

Question

I'm new to databases, but I think I finally have a situation where flat files won't work.

I'm writing a program to analyze the outcomes of multiplayer games, where each game could have any number of players grouped into any number of teams. I want to allow players can win, tie, or leave partway through the game (and win/lose based on team performance).

I also might want to store historical player ratings (unless it's faster to just recompute that from their game history), so I don't know if that means storing each player's rating alongside each game played, or having a separate table for each player, or what.

Answer 1

You didn't mention any need for locking mechanisms where multiple users may be competing to write the same data to the same resource (a database record or file in the case of flat files) simultaneously. What I would suggest is get a good book on database design and try to understand normalization rules in depth. Distributing data across separate tables have a performance impact, but they also have an effect on the ease-of-use of query construction. This is a very involving topic, and there's no simple answer to it. That's why companies hire database administrators to keep their data structures optimized.

You might want to look at SQLite, if you need a lightweight database engine.

Answer 2

I don't see any criteria that impacts database choice, but I'll list the free ones:

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• SQL Server Express
• Oracle Express

I don't recommend an embedded database like SQLite, because embedded databases make trade-offs in features to accommodate space & size concerns. I don't agree with their belief that data typing should be relaxed - it's lead to numerous questions on SO about about to deal with date/time filtration, among others...

You'll want to learn about normalization, getting data to Third Normal Form (3NF) because it enforces referential integrity, which also minimizes data redundancy. For example, your player stats would not be stored in the database - they'd be calculated at the time of the request based on the data onhand.

Answer 3

Some good options were mentioned already, but I really think that on Java platform, H2 is a very good choice. It is perfect for testing (in-memory test database), but works very well also for embedded use cases and as stand-alone "real database". Plus it is easy to export as dump file, import from that, to move around. And works efficiently too. It is developed by a very good Java DB guy, and is not his first take, and you can see this from maturity of the project. On top of this it is still being actively developed as well as supported.

Answer 4

Try also OrientDB. It's free (Apache 2 license), run everywhere, supports SQL and it's really fast. Can insert 1,000,000 of records in 6 seconds on common hw.

Answer 5

A word on why nobody even mentions any of the "NoSQL" databases while you have used it as a tag:

Non-SQL databases are getting a lot of attention (or even outright hype) recently, because of some high-profile usecases, because they're new (and therefore interesting), and because their promise of incredible scalability (which is "sexy" to programmers). However, only a very few very big players actually need that kind of scalability - and you certainly don't.

Another factor is that SQL databases require you to define your DB schema (the structure of tables and columns) beforehand, and changing it is somewhat problematic (especially if you already have a very large database). Non-SQL databases are more flexible in that regard, but you pay for it with more complex code (e.g. after you introduce a new field, your code needs to be able to deal with elements where it's not yet present). It doesn't sound like you need this kind of flexibility either.