Communities::Database

As important as the physical layout is the information layout. A community is only as good as the structures in place, beyond the 3D, physically viewable structures. A database, combined with structured query language (SQL) can be used to handle the information in a community, make things easy to find, store records of the past, and predict what might happen in the future. The problem is not the number of records that a database can store, rather it is the way in which it is designed, so that it can grow as needed and be accessed as needed, without performance being degraded by the number of queries per second.

The major components of a community that have been already defined in the 3D, physical layout are who is involved, what they do and where they live. Also needed are supplies, equipment and storage as well as places to grow food and process it, and places to manufacture and fix things. Important parameters for living are temperature, humidity and wind speed, hours of sunlight and the availability and purity of water in its various forms. There are a lot of things to be concerned about! Fortunately, a well constructed database can handle most of this.

In the actual construction of a database, we need to be concerned about giving each item a unique id, a process called "normalization" (whereby each table does not contain redundant data), foreign key constraints (so the databae doesn't break), ways to access it, ways to enter information accurately, ways to store the database so that it is available as needed, as well as keeping it securely backed up. It is possible, that for various fields (no pun intended) such as for agriculture, weather or soil types, there are already well established databases that are open sourced and can be used as is. What we will be concerned about here is to ensure consistency of data storage and presentation, regardless of the data type, so that it will be easy to learn and remember.