Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 11, 2015

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SWITCHING FED TO A NEW DATABASE

by Hazed

Alan is planning to change the database the game uses to store all the player data. It won’t happen right away, and when it does happen, you shouldn’t see any difference – assuming everything goes to plan.

Right now, the game uses a database called Berkeley DB (BDB), which we’ve been using since the AOL days. This database came out of a research project which was then spun off into a commercial company with the splendid name of Sleepycat Software. They made the software available under open source.

In 2006 the company was bought by Oracle, and a year later they changed the terms of the open source licence. The old licence said you had to publish the source code of your product only if you were using BDB in software which you distributed or sold, but Oracle’s new licence means anyone who uses BDB on a network or on the internet would have to publish all their source code. The consensus is that it’s intended to force people to move over to a commercial licence for the database, under which they wouldn’t have to publish their code.

So far Fed has not been affected by this change for the simple reason that we are using a much older version of BDB which is still under the old GLP licence. But sooner or later the various Linux distribution companies are going to stop supporting such an old version, at which point we would be forced to upgrade. By looking into this now, we have time to compare alternatives, and make sure new code is properly tested.

Alan is currently looking at an alternative database called Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) which does more or less the same as BDB, without the licensing shenanigans.

But it’s going to take a while to figure out exactly how it works and get it integrated with Fed. Once it is ready to go live I will let you know.

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