Eve Online started out life early on with the “Database”. Because the DB existed already and was relatively convenient, we put data into it. Later, we realized that a lot of data was stuff that our game designers authored (like solar systems and their contents) that we called “static data”, and a clever system was created for versioning this data with revisions at a row level. It didn’t seem unreasonable at the time, and the waterfall mechanics of our release process matched pretty closely with the mechanisms in the database versioning system.
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