I think it is generally a bad idea to use the player's character name as the primary key that links together the tables for the following reasons:

• Renaming the player will be unnecessarily difficult (since the character name will have to be updated in almost every table) (yes, I realize you could setup a cascading update to update the character name foreign key in every table; however, this is completely unnecessary and a waste of resources)
• Data storage is massively redundant, which defeats the purpose of a relational database
• The currently proposed schema will require 32 bytes of storage for every record in almost every table just for the primary key

A substantially better design would be a Characters table which contains a Unique Identifier (auto-number, GUID, or other similar field type), this revised schema would only require between 4-16 bytes per record per table and allow the character name to be updated in a single place.

This same concept would apply to items, weapons, monsters, NPCs, or any other similar table.

Hmm the table specifications on this page are rather out of date. The tables used by our server in development are already using unique identifiers. See sqlitestorage.cpp. --Bjørn 03:36, 21 November 2005 (CET)

Table Naming

I think the table names should avoid using the "tmw" prefix for the following reasons:

• There was a discussion in the forum about renaming the project from "The Mana World" to something else (which would require a substantial amount of work later on, since all database table names and queries (used by both the server application and website) would have to be updated/changed
• Since this is an open source project, other developers may want to use the database/server/client as a starting point for their own projects, in which case we are creating unecessary work for them by placing "tmw" prefix on table names
• Other projects that use TMW source/structure may generate code that could be merged back into TMW; however, if the table names had "TMW" and the other projects removed it, additional work will be necessary for the re-integration of the code

Sure hardcoding our table prefix isn't a good idea. My suggestion however is to keep using the "tmw" prefix, but making it possible to change it using a single #define somewhere. --Bjørn 03:36, 21 November 2005 (CET)