Hey Guys, im making a solitaire with a muliplayer later on and i dont know what are the best databases to use. Currently im using firebase realtime database for everything but i dont know if its the best way for user managment. Isnt it better to use a relational database for user managment or should i use one database for everything? I guess the best database for muliplayer is the realtime database but is it the best way for all data? What databases are you using for what? Do you use different databases for different usage? Pls share your knowhow with me 
If you don’t require real-time updates, then I’d recommend a good old LAMP or LEMP stack. You can pretty much choose whatever RDBMS in the stack, but I tend to go with MySQL or MariaDB.
LAMP/LEMP is quick and easy to both set up and scale as necessary if you know any PHP. Even if you don’t know any PHP beforehand, you can typically pick up more than enough in a day (or less) if you have other programming experience.
I use a BaaS platform that provides a fair range of API functions targeted at gaming applications. It’s called App42 and they provide a pure LUA SDK for Solar2D. You can go over their documentation and see if it meets your requirements. Uptime and latency are good and they offer a free tier for about a million or so API calls
Is their free plan only for one month? then charge? even with few requests?
No. There’s only a limit based on API calls which resets monthly. It’s not the most up to date platform but very reliable and intuitive . We’ve used it for all sorts of things right from leaderboards to pushing holiday special graphics directly to the app around Christmas time and much more. Worth a look
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Their prices are crazy! If I ran my games on their platform I’d be paying many $ thousands a month. With my own server it is $200 a month. Nothing to recommend here.
I often hear the people complain or worry about the limits of free networking services. My 2 cents is that if you are 99% sure you are going to hit those limits or if you love doing backend work or just want learn then go build you own solution with and/or use a reasonable paid service. If are an indie developer who does not have a large base and will have under ~70,000 people use you game/app use the free service and worry about switching when that makes more sense(I.e are making money to justify the time and resources).
I personally helped 3 startups using firebase(they were for apps), 2 failed and I am happy did throw my time away doing a building a custom backend for each one of them and one has been very successful and is being switched over to custom backend.
I was able to negotiate $500 per month for 20mil api calls with them and that was when we were seeing 20-30k mobile users a day + 2-3k on pc for the app for about a 2 month period. But custom’s always better. I dont reckon most developers here including myself have that big of a userbase
Are your games multiplayer?
I looked at their largest dedicated solution on their pricing page and that was $564.48 a month. Already nearly 3x what mine costs and a lower spec.
Looking at my server, it is doing ~250k procedure calls an hour. Every API is a mostly a single procedure call so that would get expensive.
The 10GB limit per month is really low. I currently average 25GB per hour. My host doesn’t charge for bandwidth so that works well for me.
Yeah if youve already switched over to your own backend then nothing’s quite like it.
I could be biased and/or ignorant because I’ve not used other services besides app42 and they communicate with us directly for any help or assistance as we’re practically neighbours
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