Re: Reversing transactions on a large scale

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 4:36 PM, snacktime <snacktime(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Right now we are running mysql as that is what was there when I
> entered the scene. We might switch to postgres, but I'm not sure if
> postgres makes this any easier.
>
> We run a couple of popular games on social networking sites. These
> games have a simple economy,and we need to be able to time warp the
> economy back in time, which means reverting a whole lot of
> transactions and inventories. Our games generate around 1 million
> user transactions per hour, which results in inserts/updates on 4
> times that many rows. Using PIT recovery would be a very reliable
> way to accomplish this, but I'm wondering how long it would take. If
> it takes a full day to roll back an hour of game time, then I need to
> find another solution.

PITR is pretty fast, since it sequentially applies changes to the
database as fast as it can. Your hardware has a lot to do with this
though. Applying changes to a machine with plenty of memory, fast
CPUs, and a big rockin RAID-10 array will of course be much faster
than doing the same thing on a laptop.

If you make "base" sets every night at midnight with snapshots, then
it shouldn't take too long. Is this gonna be a regular thing, or is
this more of an occasional occurance when things in the game go
horribly wrong?