# Insane idea for later...

Posted on October 1, 2012

So, an idea I had while mostly brain dead last night is rather dotty.

But, I figure I should document it in case I should try it later.

This is a completely theoretical concept that may be useful, but it is not in the realm where I am willing to attempt for a single game.

It seems to be better for having synchronized load with a ton of data.

## Preluding Concept

The existing Entity-Property-Attribute structures already have the ability to be stored in a database instead of locally in memory.

However, when considering a single entity, it is not possible to get all the information you need in a single record. Theoretically, the tables only have a few columns..

I’m mirroring the design included in the graph before, where Attributes are promises, or shared references of values.

I do this because defaults have no reason to be duplicated. Especially strings.

About anything can be represented this way, but may not be efficient to handle when it comes to the MB in raw data, or even GB.

So, we know that the relationship for an entity is that an entity has some set of Properties and a set of Attributes. These Properties have a contracted set of Attributes and types.

Note: It is Illegal for two properties to use the same Attribute with different types. So we will not consider such cases.

# Concept

But, the problem with the above structure is not it’s ability to store. It is generic enough to support it. It faces efficiency problems when put into a database with arbitrarily large amounts of data. Also, when queried, Entities must parse one row for every attribute. For sufficiently complex Entities, there is one join involved, and the data can be scattered all over, making retrieval times potentially detrimentally slow with big data sets.

Usually views, or materialized views are created in typical databases to hide the joins or to have an existing known set of data quickly accessible.

However, views and materialized views only work when the data structure is already known.

If we want to replicate the usefulness of tables, we’ll need to consider a few things.

Let’s consider the facts:

1. We know that only a single Entity by a given ID will exist.
2. We know that all Entities with the same set of Properties will have the same exact amount of Attributes with the same types.
3. We know that an Entity’s Property set is fluid, meaning that it can change at any time
4. We know that components will be the primary consumer of selecting entities from the database and have expectations for what Attributes exist.

Let’s consider what we desire:

• Fast Selection of an Entity for a Component
• Fast Selection of all relevant Attributes for a Component
• Ability to change Properties at runtime, such as when new components may register an existing property with additional attributes

We now move on to determining a solution by using tables that have all attributes associated with an entity on a single row.

Note: we previously stated that the structure for views must be known at creation time.

# Solution

What I propose is that tables are created for each set of Properties.

Also, because strings are costly to concatenate, the table names should be fixed in length, so a template that queries can just have a portion rewritten.

Fixed length information based on variable length information can only be done with a hash. I plan to use CRC32, it’s short, and can be dependable. It’s a 32 bit integer, which can be represented in hex.

Suppose we have an entity with the following properties

• Apples
• Cheese
• Bananas

Note: I put these out of order for a reason

We want an Entity’s Properties to be considered as a set, and that the set has a unique hash no matter what order the Properties have been added.

Thus we sort the list before calculating the hash, which is based on the names concatenated to each other.

The CRC32 of ApplesBananasCheese is 0x56A8B8DB x is a valid start character of a table, thus we can name the table for Entities which have this unique set of Properties x56A8B8DB. The columns consisting of the first being the Entity ID, an integer. The columns following are named an escaped rendition of the Attribute names, that is to say, Attribute names which are in a suitable database column name.

Note: We’ll consider escaped Attribute names that happen to match, but are derived from two different Attribute names to be Illegal, and such should be wisely decided beforehand. Also, Attribute names in the database are likely case insensitive.

Having such a table defined with the method above fulfills Fast Selection of all relevant Attributes for a Component. However, we need to know which table to look in.

Though there is one more thing to consider, which brings views into necessity. A Component should not need to go through indirection to fetch each entity that happens to have the properties it cares about. We already know that a subset of some Properties contain all the attributes of that set of Properties. Thus if a component only cared about the properties Apples, Bananas, then it can calculate the CRC once and use that each time, thus string processing is brought to a minimum on the client side.

However, this means that we’ll need a view which contains a unions of all tables which contain these properties.

Therefore, we should create a view called vB07B9BFA, B07B9BFA being the CRC of ApplesBananas.

For readability reasons, the names have not been CRC’d

So, components will actually query views, which are a subset, though may not be a proper subset of the existing tables. However, this way, the entry point for a component is simple and not complex.

This fulfills desire Fast Selection of an Entity for a Component.

Now for the last desire, Ability to change Properties at runtime

Let’s establish that a few meta tables exist, defining what attributes properties have, their defaults, and their component id’s. There also exists a table defining for each component, what properties exist, and an ID for a Property Template. Also, there’s a table defining all views and tables which a Property is included in.

A Property Template is the Component’s ideal view of a property, listing it’s attributes by name, their types and defaults.

When an augment occurs, the components are reconsidered in sum to find the union of all Attributes for a given Property, and columns are added, never removed. We cannot remove columns when a component is unregistered automatically because component unregistration may happen at any time, but we may still value the data later if the same component is registered once more.

We may have a clean or vacuum command which will remove columns if we as administrators plan to drop such information permanently.

Until then, all new entries will have null values.

This allows us to safely augment our tables without affecting live or existing components.

Because we have views, our entities will only exist in One Table, however, they are accessible in multiple views.

All Tables have the Entity Column indexed ascending.

Meta Tables have about every column indexed ascending, except for further meta information, such as the type of Attribute.

It is important to notice however, that it is possible for the count of the powerset of Properties to exist in Tables and Views.

$$$$2^{\parallel Properties \parallel}$$$$

This won’t be much of a problem since most tables are sparse, and combination of properties are usually related. It leaves up to the database to be optimal with the vast data.

# Done

Wow, this was amazingly long. And it took 4 hours to type out.

It has been plaguing my mind all day, exploding to get out. Maybe I can finally get some rest and focus on work, and school stuff…

I’m quite satisfied though that I was able to (to me) coherently type this all out.