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It had all the makings of a successful product launch: a highly-recognizable brand, a built-in global fanbase of millions, and a great team of game developers with roots in a silicon valley icon – Google. But the launch of Pokemon Go, the highly anticipated augmented-reality mobile game, was immediately followed by a barrage of social media complaints over server outages. And the fact that this wasn’t even a worldwide release further illustrates the critical challenge the online gaming industry faces in scaling their applications to global demand.
While the cause of this particular failure isn’t clear yet, problems with applications that rely on online transaction processing (OLTP), such as those used in online gaming, are often rooted in the underlying database. In particular, companies leveraging relational databases have to think about issues associated with scaling to peak demand, concurrency, and latency. These challenges arise due to the limitations of relational databases commonly used to power online gaming applications – usually MySQL or one of its derivatives – which were architected for single-server implementation only, and don’t allow you to scale out like other cloud applications.
These problems can only be solved by using scale-out relational database technologies that allow you to maintain linear performance and the full data integrity of ACID compliance.
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