So I'm playing an MMO and the servers shut down due to maintenance. What is "maintenance"?

[jayjay]

@Broomstick

It’s Blackrock Depths and not Blackwing Lair, but I always thought of the Grim Guzzler as something like that, a place the NPC’s go to chill out when they aren’t being attacked by raid groups.

Heh…I always thought it was kind of cool that the Guzzler was like an open city. Everyone’s still hostile, as such, but they won’t aggro on you unless you do something wrong.

[kushiel]

@Broomstick

It’s Blackrock Depths and not Blackwing Lair, but I always thought of the Grim Guzzler as something like that, a place the NPC’s go to chill out when they aren’t being attacked by raid groups.

It’s gotta be awkward when Illidan and the Lich King both decide they need a drink. However, it would be the best bar fight ever.

[Carl_Corey]

Reminds me of abut from Grim Fandango:

Manny: Is the server down?

Worker: The server is not down. The server is NEVER down. It’s just temporarily unavailable while I do some maintenance, is all.

[vinniepaz]

@Geekboy

1: Database maintenance. This is the biggie. Databases like this, that are hit thousands of times a minute by thousands of users who may or may not drop their connections during a transaction, who may be madly clicking on the latest exploit, these databases eventually get lost records, bad index items, orphaned transactions, whatever. You may have seen this sort of thing when you try and get an item out of your mail only to be told you can’t because you already have one in inventory. The databases need to be cleaned up and rebuilt periodically. This takes a good chunk of time and is usually the main time-suck for the weekly downtime.

Not that I doubt you, but I was under the impression that database software like SQL is specifically written to prevent this from happening. We even learned some acronym like ACID or something… I know the A stood for atomicity. It made sense at the time, the textbook said that payment processing and bank accounts are implemented in this software so lost records, incomplete transactions etc. are unacceptable.

I’ve never had to use databases on any large scale. Is it just that these checks sometimes fail? Or does WOW use a database system that doesn’t employ them?

[Nava]

@vinniepaz

I’ve never had to use databases on any large scale. Is it just that these checks sometimes fail? Or does WOW use a database system that doesn’t employ them?

We don’t have the technical details: as far as we know, no current Blizzard employees post here. But we do know that there are ingame errors which get automatically fixed with the game up, others which need reboots, and we know that some of the “minipatches” are updates to database records (fixing things which, while not exactly “bugged”, were definitely miscoded).