[HN Gopher] Database "sharding" came from Ultima Online?
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Database "sharding" came from Ultima Online?
Author : fanf2
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-08-25 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raphkoster.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raphkoster.com)
| leshokunin wrote:
| For context, Raph Koster is not only the person who designed
| Ultima Online, but generally considered one of the top
| theoricians in game design. This isnt some guy who has a small
| blog and came up with a neat explanation for how some word came
| about in the early days of the web. Its the guy who did it.
| Sakos wrote:
| > Flickr, of course, was born as an MMO called Game Neverending
|
| Wait, what? Never knew about this, that's a fun little fact.
|
| The wiki says this:
|
| > Flickr was launched on February 10, 2004, by Ludicorp, a
| Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and
| Caterina Fake. The service emerged from tools originally created
| for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively
| multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project,
| and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.
| mintplant wrote:
| And Slack came from their second attempt at an MMO, Glitch.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Eventually Butterfield and Fake got bored with Flickr and
| created Game Neverending 2: Glitch.
|
| Glitch got pretty much exactly as traction as Game Neverending,
| which is to say "nowhere near enough to be economically
| viable". This time they spun off their internal chat tool to
| create Slack.
| Sakos wrote:
| Didn't realize it was the exact same people who made Slack.
| Geez, I wish I could be that accidentally successful, much
| less twice in a row.
| meiraleal wrote:
| They are the best at creating anything besides games. Are
| they working on Game Neverending 3 already?
| mygrant wrote:
| Caterina had nothing to do with Glitch or Slack. Stewart
| obviously did, but so did a lot of other GNE and Flickr
| founders and employees.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I find this hard to parse: link bit rot due to its age, there's
| some likely tongue-in-cheek references to himself, the layers of
| people and companies, UO mythology...
|
| The answer to the question in the title, and at the end, seems to
| be yes! Google n-gram viewer has the first references to database
| shard/sharding in 2005, and Ultima Online came out in 1997.
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=database+shard...
| dboreham wrote:
| It was called partitioning and existed long before. The syndrome
| of "new" people believing they have invented something, naming it
| without realizing it already had been invented long ago and
| already had a name, is quite common.
| layer8 wrote:
| Sharding is a specific type of partitioning, it's not a
| synonym.
| itisit wrote:
| Yes, the recency illusion. Often exacerbated by those thinking
| prior generations were stupid for not knowing things they
| couldn't rightly have known.
| stavros wrote:
| The article is about the origin of the name.
| CodeMage wrote:
| The blog post is about the name "sharding", as opposed to the
| concept of partitioning. True, this is not obvious from the
| title alone, but the post is pretty clear.
| da-holland wrote:
| semi-related, but also helps me to believe that this is the case
| (and not only because the different regional servers were called
| "shards" in Ultima Online):
|
| in the "Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition" book by two
| programmers who worked on Ultima and Sims (and other Origin/EA
| games of the time) back in the day, they share some war stories
| of programming, and if memory serves there is a portion where
| they talk about the original design, and the realization that
| lead to the sharding and how the login and shard system worked in
| the game.
|
| Also, unrelated, a really neat war story about a guy who put in
| debug code to generate certain audio cues while a game was
| running to catch a bug.
|
| The book all in all was a fun read if only for all these stories,
| and generally remember good coding guidelines as well but it is
| using older C++ that may not stand up to modern critique.
|
| [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1133776574
| other_herbert wrote:
| Ha re: audio cues for debugging... your pc speaker is truly an
| underused tool when debugging something infrequent... for
| example our system processes a lot of xml data and usually it's
| fine but for our test suite hearing beeps and knowing there are
| server side issues immediately is a great thing
| samstave wrote:
| AS one of the early big players of UO (In that it consumed an
| entire wall of machines in the Intel Game 'DRG' Lab in the late
| 90s - Shards came from UO.
|
| And the concept as described in how he brought it from the
| Sosarian Lore is laser etched into my head, because along the
| same fantastical lines we also have the infamous The Dark Crystal
| - and so having that be a strong element in the SciFi-Fantasy DNA
| of anyone of my generation into gaming, sci-fi etc - it was
| completely grokked immediately and understood.
|
| UO is one of the golden eras of my gaming DNA.
| westurner wrote:
| Wikipedia has:
|
| Shard (database architecture) > Etymology:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_(database_architecture)#...
|
| Partition > Horizontal partitioning --> Sharding:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(database)
|
| Database scalability > Techniques > Partitioning:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_scalability
|
| Network partition:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_partition
| distantsounds wrote:
| why is every social media network now just "post something with
| varying levels of correctness because it farms engagement"
|
| it's so exhausting needing to just read comments to get the
| actual, real truth
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Hmmm... I vaguely recall the term "shards" when referring to DB/2
| running on S36, S38, and later newfangled AS/400 across the
| world. When presenting the data in a single pane, some "shards"
| would come in late, or be broken, and require reconnecting.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Previously on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35479553 (90 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438399 (172 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425765 (3 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17926566 (1 comment)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16343939 (1 comment)
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