> The games industry is weird: It simultaneously lags behind the rest of the tech industry by half-a-decade in some areas and yet it can be years ahead in others.
I'd love to see examples of "ahead" coz I literally never saw it. Game dev studios act like automated testing is a new thing...
> PostgresSQL performed much better and had the additional benefit of being able to cleanly split write-ahead logs (which are largely sequential) and data to separate RAID devices. Something that MySQL doesn’t really support and would have to be hacked in using Symlinks on every table create.
It's funny that you can guess that it this happened good few years ago purely because the solution to above wasn't just "slap a NVMe on it"
>I tested this and ordered the storage I would need to have a rolling 90 day window of backups (with older backups being taken off-site)..
>The hardware request was rejected.
> When I inquired as to why, I was told that Ubisoft has a standard backup solution which is replicated globally and sent to cold storage in a bank vault somewhere in Paris. I was told this is because we had lost some source code once upon a time and we could no longer build certain games because of that.
My first thought was "why not just ship pg backups + wal logs there" and just a full backup from time to time. No read-back needed.
The whole problem seems to be "the admin overengineered solution without knowing the constraint, then tried to headbutt the constraints instead of changing approach
> Our EMC DataDomain system was optimised primarily for ingesting huge volumes of traffic, but if we want incremental backups then perhaps we needed a something a little more dynamic.
Nope, your incremental approach sucked. Majority of software that I've seen used to do incremental backups could generate incrementals on its own, without any readback from server.
The minority *was software that wholly managed backups*, so it was prepared for that, and often it was just "read metadata from database" instead of actual data.
> I don’t know what else to take away from this.
That people use tapes for backups so ? To get your requirements before implementing solution ? To find better solution when requirements are known ? To not get stuck in initial idea.
Literally the basic, recommended way of doing PostgreSQL backups with no extra software would work.