A persistent data storage design for real-time interactive applications

Real-time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA) like multiplayer online games usually work in a persistent environment (also called virtual world) which continues to exist and evolve also while the user is offline and away from the application. This paper deals with storing persistent data of real-time interactive applications in modern relational databases. We describe a preliminary design of the Entity Persistence Module (EPM) middleware which liberates the application developer from writing and maintaining complex and error-prone, application-specific code for persistent data management.