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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jimmifett" data-source="post: 5587293" data-attributes="member: 55006">Two words: Datatype Storage.Any intelligently designed system (and i'll give the benefit of the doubt that CB is 'intelligently' designed, even tho that may be stretching it quite some distance) will store it's data in the smallest and most easily comparable datatype possible. What this means is you have a table of religions, each has an associated integer that represents that religion. When you store the character, you store it's religion as 2 instead of 'Bahamut', because it saves space, and it's significatly faster to compare 2 == 2 than 'Bahamut' == 'Bahamut' when looking other things up. Since you are storing an integer, you can't simply just store the value of a text field in it's place. Sure you can add a religion to the religion table, but there is going to be more information that the system expects (and usually requires) to know about a single religion entry. Add on top of that, you need to come up with a way to denote that this religion is classified as a 'house rule' tied to some player (think of it as a source identifier, like MM3 or Dra400). Now, you need to add a subsystem and UI to allow the player to search and 'subscribe' or 'inculde' that source as part of the campaign so you don't have an ungodly huge list of deities from every joe blow that inputs a religion all displayed at once. Then, you might also want a table that allows the creator to associate custom religions with major campaign religions for the purpose of 'filing off the numbers' for feat/power/etc support with the custom religion. When it was the old CB, information was stored in very loosely coupled xml, which allowed all kinds of junk data to be strewn anywhere because there wasn't a good schema (data model) to keep it all straight. When you start dealing with databases, you have to be significatly more strict, and you have to enforce data type integrity. Take a car, you put gas in the tank. Just because diesel, bio diesel, wood, coal, plutonium, and heavy water are all types of fuel, you don't just stick them in your tank and expect to go driving down the road. If you want good performance with thousands of users, as opposed to a single user on his own desktop that can devote 100% computing resources to just that user, you have to design based on using integer keys and other such things. It's not to say that it's impossible, but good developers have to take their time and actually plan things out. The difference between using a POJO for a webservice and actually sitting down and creating a strongly typed schema for in/outputs.</blockquote>

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