Quick question

[toxin]

I am working on a war game. The game will have soldiers and upgrades that improve a users stats. My questions is should I store the users stats in the database? Number of solders and upgrade level will be in the database. With this I can get the total and display to user or get an outcome of a battle without calling extra info from the database.

[DV8]

Yes. What alternative ideas do you have in storing/remembering user information?

[toxin]

Math. I would be keeping non stat totals in the database.
Say I have the stat Attack it uses attack solders and a siege upgrade in the database i have the number of soldiers and the siege upgrade stored.
If a user trains 50 attack soldiers I would update only the number of soldiers in the database.
To display what the stat is i would use a formula. This would be the same formula used to update a stat if stored in the database.

[DV8]

Ah, now I get it. In principle, the rules of normalised data say that you never store results of an equation if you also store the elements in the same equation. There are examples where it would become a pain to recalculate everything all the time, but depending on how complex things become it might be worth it.

[chrisjenkinson]

You can do the calculations in SQL in most cases, which will normally be faster than doing them in PHP, Ruby or whatever script language you are using.

[Chris]

You can do the calculations in SQL in most cases, which will normally be faster than doing them in PHP, Ruby or whatever script language you are using.

This is evil. Do not do it. Every single SQL optimization manual/site/article I ever read repeat the mantra "do not use SQL as a calculator".

[chrisjenkinson]

As with so many questions, "it depends", actually. This StackOverflow topic is quite good:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/19392/when-is-it-better-to-offload-work-to-the-rdbms-rather-than-to-do-it-in-code