How to SSH Tunnel to AWS-external Databases (DevBlog #33)

How to what?? Sorry for the messy headline. That’s what happens when you try to cram every relevant aspect of an article into a half-sentence. So here is what I try to say with it: RDS databases on AWS are expensive, and if you don’t utilize them heavily, try to avoid them! On my web space at DomainFactory, I have 10 databases included in my plan, so why not use them instead! Sounds like no big deal, but you need to know some things about SSH tunnels and Unix Domain Sockets to pull it off. Here is what worked for me, and hopefully will help you as well.

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Realm Database for Unity Games (DevBlog #31)

Network Traders, the game I am currently working on, stores parts of the game data in a central, cloud-hosted database. But some of the user-specific data is private in nature and therefore only stored on the player’s mobile device. Until now, I have just serialized this data to persistent storage. But as I needed to add new user-specific properties, I wondered why I should not use a database on the client as well. After all, they may provide benefits such as atomicity or migrations when the database schema changes. After some searching I found Realm, which integrated nicely into my Unity project, although with some intricacies I would have liked to know beforehand.

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