Why not put the world in a MySQL database?

I mean it would speed things up quite a bit and the world would be much more editable too.
Why has no one thought this up?

 

A: How would it speed it up? Loading from disk is about 10MB/s minimum speed, is your upload/download faster than that?
B: How would it make it more editable? Surely you know... clicking a file is easy?

 

A: what about gigabit internet speeds? and it would speed it up because instead of loading "chunks" you could load the entire area the player is in in one go, world generation would also be much faster and you would if you wanted, gen as much land as you wanted without traveling.

B:surely you know how awesomely fast a MySQL (dont even get me started on postgreSQL) can edit,insert,remove data at insane speeds and efficiency?

 

I've thought about that about 9 months ago but I've been told it wouldn't make a difference because SQL data is also stored on disk. Now you'll be like "yeah but SQL keeps used data in memory" and I'll answer you that my world file is >10gb and it can't all be in memory.

I still think there'd be a way to speed things up with MSSQL or MySql or others. I've briefly looked at the chunk save code and found it to complicated to try at this myself.

 

Well how hard would a simple, lets say C programmed server using SQL for the database be to make? Like just a simple flat terrain of dirt/stone that's walkable? surely that would be a good test to see if a server made in a better language to handle this kinda work would do?

 

I'll wish you good luck starting your own minecraft server program.

 

where would i get like, how to handle incoming packets? like what is sent by the client? and what is sent by the server?

 

I run my server on a RAMdisk and so my bottle neck is now the Internet connection speed. While this will work for small maps, I agree with @ZachBora that server data is still housed on disk so I don't think there would be any benefit to housing the chunk data in a MySQL database.

 

according to this article, http://www.haxney.org/2011/02/minecabinet-database-backed-chunk.html using mysql for world storage on a vanilla server gave a performance increase of 4 times faster. I'd love to have this option for my bukkit server.