Generic Architecture

[Trumpcard]

From an architectural design perspective, heres my comment..

I'd just stick with mysql.. its completely portable and lightweight, and it'll keep your support channels down. Go out to too many database systems and you'll end up with endless installation, configuration and support questions for a myrid of database systems. Just do yourself a favor and lock the database requirements.

I'd also consider trying to gear towards mysql 5 and writing as much as possible as stored procedures. The queries for the most part will be really simple, but doing them as stored procedures will make the queries alot easier to support (they'll be in a master mysql stored proc definition file versus scattered all throughout the code in inlined queries ) , and from a performance engineering perscpestive, it'll be ALOT easier to track down poorly performing database calls by using the server side performance timings and call frequencies that the database itself will generate. Needed optimizations will be alot easier to perform, as you'll have better metric data to decide what needs to be optimized.

Also, doing the calls as stored procedures, it'll make it easy for you to develop add on tools in other languages such as PHP (web interfaces/info sites) that exploit the exact same stored procedures to retrieve data without having to reinvent the data calls inside a different language. I know from experience that 20 different people developed 20 independent web tools and what not so there was a ton of code duplication in terms of the queries. Just make a set of stored procedures that handle all those requests and when new folks need new types of queries, just merge them into the SP base.

[BlueHi]

I agree 100% with Trumpcard. Although I use coldfusion instead of php I could do the exact same thing. I would love to see stored procedures. Maybe I am talking about something a little differant but here is how I would use them. I work with SQLserver and don't know to much about mysql. With my experience of working with stored procedures and using web based code like php and coldfusion is that you don't need to know how the program works you only need to know what value's the stored procedures returns which is great. This makes development a lot faster and also it can be used over and over again in other programs. Like I say I don't know much about php but in coldfusion I would simply just include a program that uses the stored procedure so there would be no duplication for that query. I am not so sure how much that would benifit the development of EQEmu but I do know that it would help those of us who link a website to there database for eqemu.