Java – what database do you want to use?

I'm new to database, but I think I've finally encountered a situation where flat files don't work properly

I'm writing a program to analyze the results of multiplayer games. Each game can group any number of players into any number of teams I want to allow players to win, draw or leave (and win / lose according to team performance)

I may also want to store historical player ratings (unless recalculated faster from their game history), so I don't know if this means storing each player's rating with each game, or setting up a table for each player, or what

Solution

You didn't mention any cases where locking mechanism is required, where multiple users may compete to write the same data to the same resource (database record or file in flat file) at the same time What I suggest is to get a good book on database design and try to understand the normalization rules in depth Distributing data in different tables will affect performance, but they will also affect the ease of query construction This is a very complex topic and there is no simple answer This is why companies hire database administrators to keep their data structure optimized

If you need a lightweight database engine, you may need to look at SQLite