The Importance of Databases in Game Development

Early in my game development core sequence classes I had to take an introductory database class.  It focused mostly on writing robust queries and the SQL Language itself.  There was still some talk about database management to understand normalization and the like in MySQL, but it mostly focused on queries.  At the time, I honestly didn't see the benefit in the class and I certainly wasn't alone in this analysis.  This was very short sighted for a number of reasons.  Let me digress:

First, everything, and I mean everything is moving onto the cloud.  Developers are pushing a lot more than just player profiles and the online stats of games 10 years ago.  Data as complex as custom game content means more developers, in more areas of a game's code need to be comfortable writing SQL queries which are reasonably efficient.  One poorly written query can be devastating to a server if it is hit enough times.

Secondly, social networking games is a vastly expanding market.  In these games, typically every piece of persistent data has to be put onto a database somewhere.  Therefore, when prototyping, developers have to understand good database design principles and be familiar with libraries used on their platform.

Last but not least, databases are being utilized in very cool ways to accomplish robust logging and resource management.

So why might a database be a worthwhile log listener for your logging system?  What makes it any better than a text or html file?  Technically a text file can be revisioned properly to store all the latest information, but this can be troublesome when large teams are handling the same content at once.  A database alleviates a lot of these problems and head aches.  In addition, SQL queries can serve as an excellent debugging tool.  Sure, a text file can store the same data but it is unreasonable for a programmer to hack together new parsing code every time they are looking for shared issues.  A well designed database will allow programmers to use joins and subqueries to find meaningful relationships (and problems) in their application.  Tom Niwinski discusses how they used databases in such a manner in his excellent feature on Gamasutra.  He describes how they had an AI controlled character roam their game world and log errors to the database.

Picture this scenario.  A large team installs the latest nightly build.  They all have an automated bot roam their world overnight.  In the morning they check for new entries in the database.  All these separate instances can now be joined and compared for common issues.  Log entries might specify an error, such as a player falling through the world, and give the world position.  Level designers can proceed to go to that position in the map and resolve the issue.

In his excellent book, Jason Gregory explains how databases can be used as resource managers.  They are more than capable of storing unique global identifiers, meta-data for game content, and a revision history for an object's life cycle.  Primary keys and heavily normalized tables lend themselves well to cross referenced integrity and truly singular identifiers

So...in summary.  Databases matter, in more ways than you might think.