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   Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 22:12:51 JST Rich Felker

   in reply to

   • Ben Zanin
   • Eniko Fox

   @eniko @gnomon I'm not by any means discouraging you to go for this, but on top of that, anyone with such a server really needs proper frequent backups. It probably also makes sense to ensure whatever system you pick is compatible with making incremental backups so they can be done continuously rather than at long intervals.

   • Embed this notice
     Eniko Fox (eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 22:12:53 JST Eniko Fox

     in reply to

     • Ben Zanin

     @gnomon yeah, this is why i extremely don't want to reinvent this particular wheel. acid compliance is extremely finicky in the details and just as hard to get right and i just don't have the time to do a proper job of that

     and i don't want to be the cause of a community server's save file going corrupt after people collectively put in a 1000 hours of play

   • Embed this notice
     Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 22:12:54 JST Ben Zanin

     in reply to

     • Dan Luu
     • Eniko Fox

     @eniko those articles by @danluu lay out how difficult it is for filesystems to get robustness guarantees correct while maintaining performance, and as kind of a footnote they also mention how sqlite3 works so hard so maintain robustness that it can sometimes eclipse the guarantees of the underlying filesystem - that is, its coping strategies can be more effective than the FS implementation. (Which feels counterintuitive at first, but makes sense after some pondering.)

     2/2

   • Embed this notice
     Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 22:12:55 JST Ben Zanin

     in reply to

     • Eniko Fox

     @eniko oh hello and welcome to the sqlite3 fan club

     edit: OK, no, sorry, I can be helpful instead of flippant. Beg your pardon there.

     Sqlite3 does offer ACID compliance, but its key value proposition is that it does so with minimal additional complexity. The use case it tries to fill is making it easier to be ACID-compliant than to not be: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html#:~:text=Sqlite%20does%20not,fopen%28%29

     And by golly it has succeeded wildly, cf.:

     https://danluu.com/file-consistency/

     https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/#:~:text=except%20for%20sqlite,at%20least%20one%20bug

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   • Embed this notice
     Eniko Fox (eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 22:12:56 JST Eniko Fox

     hey fedi programmer folks, this isn't urgent but i'm going to have to store my block game's world data in some kind of acid compliant database at some point. do you have any recommendations? it must be a file-based database, obviously. and game data doesn't usually neatly conform to the boring numbered rows with named columns table design of traditional databases for websites and stuff

     i think ideally i'd just be able to store raw binary data