Well, yea. But saying and doing are different things. They are saying things that are certainly possible, but they aren't doing any of things that show they are the people capable of doing them.
Yea but the way they calculate a loss is comical. I know, it matters, but its still horseshit."We expect to make $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2013. We only made $1.1 billion therefore we "lost" $.5 billion". They didn't really lose the money, they just didn't meet the estimated amount and they call it a loss.
Any calls to retrieve data require I/O, memory, or cache regardless of what format you use. You still have to pay the piper whether it's called from code, flat file, or traditional RDBMS. If you have thousands of users with millions of objects and you don't have a good transactional means of your server selecting and altering the data then you'll have issues. Your DB configuration seems more attuned to a very small server, and not an MMO. How much CPU does this require for 10 users? How about 100?
The servers are written in Erlang , which is a fully multi-threaded functional telephony language. It is the language developed in the 70s at Erickson used to write the telephone network backbones and can scale to a ridiculous degree by just adding hardware. WoW and, at least older SOE stuff works on the "old style" (I use the term loosely, old is relative in this industry) model that Vanguard and the other AAA MMOs I've worked on used. So I am very familiar with the model and needing in-house DBAs. What we have is technically superior if only because it is much newer and more similar to what companies like Facebook and Google use. Whatever DBA needs we have are handled by our server programmers and our CTO. I've never even heard the words "Database Administrator" spoken by anyone in the company in the 2 years I've been here.
Hmm...
Facebook actually has a page for their own MySQL DB setup, you know:
Right, but they use different setups for different parts of their system. The messaging system, which has similar needs to an online game, uses a NoSQL setup (HBASE) due to its need for very fast read-write and high scalability.ACIDalso isn't very important for such a system, so sacrificing that for speed scalability is a good trade-off. Now, a bank (or Amazon), can't make that trade-off especially because of the C. But an online game can, and should. It is a better setup for its specific needs.
I don't see the connection between SONY's TV/Laptop business units performing poorly and SOE. Implying a correlation between the two is quite the logical leap, considering we have almost zero data on SOE's financial performance.
Wat? Sony has lost close to 8 billion real dollars in the past ten years in TVs.
I know the vast majority of their data is hosted via MYSQL. I know they use memcache, also.
/derail
For the last few years they've been moving from MySQL to Spanner (Or BigTable for other applications). Here is just one example, but there are plenty of others on research.google:
Except for where they need very high scalability, with fast read-write like the new messaging system theydeployed in 2010 that uses HBASEbecause it is faster than MySQL.If you do some research, Facebook actually went the opposite direction. They started with non relational and moved to relational finding it was a better solution for their setup.
Since most MMOs nowadays are a step away from Facebook, I'd guess they'd be better served with a relational database.
