Persistent Storage for an Online Game's Statistics

Online games are getting popular among players these days. Displaying the latest game logs, top scores and best players makes these games exciting and this excitement affects players spend more time, try harder to achieve higher scores. In game industry, the game logs and related scoring data are usually stored in relational databases which grow enormously in size and have to be maintained and remain responsive as a critical component of the online games. Having a well-designed and responsive database structure is a key factor for an online game to remain functioning with the large volumes of data and thousands of concurrent transactions. An optimized approach is proposed toward designing a persistence layer and related databases for having an improved storage mechanism for online games. To do this, firstly the proposed database design phase is described which includes conceptual design, logical design including normalization and physical design. Then to attain the goal of improving performance, some standard features of DBMS systems, namely, stored procedures are utilized to optimize query performance and decrease bandwidth usage.