Imagine you were creating a massive persistent world where everyone would be able to change anything at will. It is a simple, powerful idea that eventually has occurred to everyone ever exposed to a game. Why there aren't many of these worlds out there? Well, this very simple idea is quite difficult and expensive to execute. Not only you need to store the information, you have to be able to write it and read it in a timely fashion.Then how about your own personal world, something you can run in your PC and invite some friends to play over. How much of your PC's performance are you willing to sacrifice, how many people could you actually invite before you would see the quality of your gameplay begin to suffer?I began wondering whether all the above could be manifestations of the same problem. What if you could have a storage solution that is lightweight so enthusiasts could run at home, and if you pieced enough of them together you could scale it so it would run massive worlds the size of planet Earth?As it turns out it was possible. I have now a shinny new database system that does exactly that. The main trick is it aligns with the same other concepts of the voxel world. So this is mainly a voxel database. It won't do any SQL queries, XPath evaluation or any other form of traditional DB interaction. It just stores and retrieves voxel data very fast.How fast? Over a 10 minute period, a machine with six-year-old Intel processor (T2500 at 2GHz) and an equally crappy HD was able to serve 10 Gigabytes worth of individual queries while another 10 Gigabytes worth of queries were being written. Each query ranged from 500 bytes to 100KBytes worth of data.That would translate into a lot of friends sharing your server. To give you a better idea, a volume of 40x40x40 worth of player voxels compresses to 2K as an average. Here is how you would compute how much space 10 GB of voxel data would be:1 chunk = 40x40x40 voxels = 12x12x12 meters1 chunk = 2K10 GB = 5,242,880 chunks = 2048x2048x2048 metersHow many people can create this amount of voxel content in 10 minutes? I have no idea, but I bet it will be an entire army. At this point the DB is the least of your concerns. The bottleneck is in the network.The twist comes now: While this rate was sustained for 10 minutes, it was not meant to push the system to the limit. The DB process CPU usage never went up 1% and the memory usage for the process remained at 3 MB. The system was responsive and usable (well as usable as a six year old PC can be), showing no big difference in behavior.Here is some evidence:For most of you who are more artistically or design inclined this is certainly the most boring screenshot I have ever posted. But if you are into programming this kind of thing, this is process porn.Of course the system is doing real work. The main clue is in a different column not displayed by Task Manager: Virtual memory, which was hovering all the time below 20 Megs. Even then the virtual memory was lower than what Google Chrome was using, which was a whooping 99 Megs.The voxel database is so fast because it uses the same virtual memory management of the OS. So, instead of writing to files in the HD directly, all the information is mapped through the OS paging system. Only the pages that need to be altered go into memory. Also the system does a lazy write to the HD. Even after the process is gone, the OS continues to save the changes to disk.I feel this is the stepping stone for great things. It will be fairly easy and inexpensive for people to set up their own servers. They could be hosting a lot of players and barely take a hit for it. This of course depends on how the networking is implemented, which leads into another favorite topic of mine: how to make a server that will not bring your PC to its knees. I will be covering that in the near future.