RSSSony Online Ent. Goes Open Source
San Diego-based Sony Online offers a number of popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMORPGs, including EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Star Wars galaxies and others.
They have "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers, said Rick Herman, vice president of business and legal affairs at Sony Online Entertainment.
The databases store terabytes of data about the "worlds" in which game characters live, battle and fall in love.
"If you took a virtual character in EverQuest and had him start running in one direction, it would take 30 days before he would reach the end of the world," Herman said.
Sony Online Entertainment Inc. is starting to move away from the Oracle databases that are the foundation of its online games, opting instead for a 2-year-old commercial open-source database based on PostgreSQL.
By midyear, Sony Online expects to have three services moved to EnterpriseDB's Advanced Server 8.1 database, according to Chris Yates, the company's vice president of technology.
Oracle's free Express edition was "not a lot of use," said Yates, who also looked at open-source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. He liked the latter's "richness" and its lower price tag. But Yates balked at the costs and hassle of retraining his staff and rewriting the database applications to run on PostgreSQL.
EnterpriseDB, on the other hand, is based on PostgreSQL but offers Oracle compatibility. That helped Yates overcome his concerns.
"Close to 80% to 90% of our applications don't need to be rewritten to use with EnterpriseDB," said David Manifold, director of database services at Sony Online.
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Tag(s):Open+Source
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