Some years ago, I encountered a neat puzzle game called Deadly Rooms of Death. While an interesting game in itself, this post is not about that. Having caught my eye, though, I had a thought to port it to some portable gaming platform. I made some effort, unfinished, to port it to Nintendo DS, and then found out more about its structure.

During Software Freedom Day 2009, this came to mind again, as someone mentioned column-oriented databases. DROD happens to use one of these, which also eschews the tradition that database engines are squeezed into SQL interfaces. Instead it’s an embeddable library, with support for file based, in-memory, or indeed overlaid databases, simultaneous reads and writes, and automatic format conversions. It’s called Metakit. This quite remarkable bit of software struck me as convenient yet remarkably unknown. It would do an excellent job in many places SQLite is now used, and I’ve long had a slight distaste for that engine because it not only relies on reparsing SQL statements, it forces conversion to text strings for any data content – particularly numeric entries. I vaguely hope this post will bring Metakit some deserved attention.