While trolling about I came across a book on Amazon.com, Seven Databases in Seven Days, touting the newish NoSQL movement. Wikipedia was next of course, because I hadn't a clue what NoSQL was - I found this entry..

So....it seems to me that games have been storing their data this way FOREVER, even enterprise level MMO games like Ultima Online. Am I crazy or is this a typical case of the games industry solving a problem 15 years before anyone else, and then something like Facebook or Google come along and claim they invented something!

One wrinkle with the above idea - is the idea of multiple server scalability and reliability, although it could be argued that the multi-shard approach UO took in the early days was a very early version of that idea.

Ok so I've had a little quality time with a NoSQL implementation, Mongo. It is a schema-less database system that stores documents (think "rows") in BSON format - a binary form of JSON. It is scalable, super easy to develop for, and supports all the typical SQLish queries you are familiar with, even using indexes on the data.

I have to admit my original understanding of noSQL was quite off the mark - it isn't just storing a binary table in memory. The schemaless structure of the data stored is a huge difference from SQL, and can be considered both a strength and a weakness.

For databases that are rapidly evolving and are scalable with simply throwing hardware at the problem noSQL is a really interesting choice. Combine that with the now required commercial licensing requirements of MySQL, and I think you'll see a non-trivial sized migration away from traditional SQL style database storage.

If you haven't looked at noSQL yet, and Mongo in particular, give it a look. Interesting stuff.

In this case I think it really is new - computing power and storage have caught up with the ability (and need) for schemaless databases - that is to say that each row (or "document" as they say in NoSQL land) contains it's own schema along with the data. Look at JSON to see what I mean.

But, yeah, you are right it turns out that while some humans are pretty clever and forward thinking, many don't realize that they are simply parroting past achievements.

Just to be clear - I never worked on a game that stored game data in the NoSQL manner - we typically had binary formatted flat files with fixed size records for super fast lookup.