Why are global datastores so frowned upon?

I have never once seen a post on this forum asking about global datastores that don’t use ordered datastores with a positive outcome.

It usually goes one of two ways, either the answer will be something along the lines of “Set up an external server” or “You just can’t do it.”

That’s just not true though, you can save all of the data in the same datastore under the same key if you need it to be global, so why is this such a hated idea in the community?

I’ve used global data stores, successfully, for a number of things, you just have to be aware of the rate limits and possible race condition issues due to caching and having multiple servers write to the same tables.

With a bit of your own simple mutex’ing or semaphor’ing, global datastores can be very useful :slight_smile:
I’d wager you’ve seen people offer alternatives, because, handling global data stores well takes a bit of complex coding and understanding of networking and data architecture.

I actually just implemented a new feature in my game yesterday using a global datastore - I have a tycoon game where players build their own cities, and I wanted to show off the leaderboard players’ cities in each server, so that meant I had to have a globally accessible table that all servers could read from - and they would also be the ones writing to update the table as the leaderboard changes over time. It’s workin like a charm so far :slight_smile:

4 Likes