Yes. But why would you want to use something as powerful as Postgres just as a storage method?
Because you're working in an object oriented environment and a relational database is rather good for storing an object states and relations?
A database query that takes 0.01 seconds to complete is fine for business, but that's a whole frame of your game gone in just one query.
Which might not be a problem, depending on when you query.
If you need a lightweight databases for non-realtime file access and the occasional query then SQLite is pretty good because you can embed it into your program.
That depends on your datamodel. If your datamodel requires a centralized permanent storage, then an embedded DB, is probably not the best solution in the world.
For complex relational data tables with many queries (e.g. if your game uses a lot of stats) then a RAM-based DB like FastDB might be better than not using a database at all.
Again - only within the same domain. In a distributed system, it's entirely useless.
Not faster, but a web service would be easier, more flexible, more scalable and wouldn't require the end user to install and administer the monster that is Postgres.
Who said anything about the end-user having to install Postgres?
I love Postgres by the way, but it's really not suitable for games in the same way that Blitz isn't designed for non-games programming.
Surely that depends entirely on which kind of game you're planning to make?
And there's always the option I mentioned of connecting to a remote database directly.
Yes. But going through ODBC (or a similar standardised framework) is likely to be better, because you don't have to change any of your game logic to accomodate a change in technological platform (if you wanted to switch from Postgres to Firebird for instance, you would just have to switch the ODBC driver and be done with it).
For game development. I'd say all you really need is a good XML file module. One that will read in an Xml file store it in memory, and allow you to navigate all of it's nodes.
Yeah. Because most of your players are going to have Internet connections that allow for 32-way peer-peer connections for sending XML. It depends on what game you're making.
Hey! There's an idea for a quick learning project. I'm going to write an XmlDocument object in BMAX that's similar to the XmlDocument object in the .Net framework.
Good idea! Keep me posted on how that one develops.