Nebulae servers support all the DBObject commands used in Shockwave MultiUser Server 2 and 3, and some new ones. These cover all DBAdmin, DBApplication, DBUser and DBPlayer functions. Older database commands used in SMUS 1 have been deprecated by Macromedia, and are NOT supported by Nebulae. A list of all commands and their syntax is available in the Command List section of this document.

The Nebulae download contains a package with HSQL Database engine classes . HSQLDB is free for redistribution and inclusion in commercial and non-commercial projects. All source code changes made by the Tabuleiro team to the HSQL engine were available to the HSQLDB developer community as part of the 1.6.1 release, and we participated in the development team for the project. HSQLDB is a very fast in-memory 100% Java database tool, and it runs in the same VM session of the Nebulae server for the best possible performance.

There is no configuration or installation needed to use databases in Nebulae. The server will automatically create and initialize a default database the first time it is started. The following files will be created in the server directory:

NebulaeDB.data

NebulaeDB.backup

NebulaeDB.script

NebulaeDB.properties

These files contain the cached version of the database. It is recommended that at least one administrative user is created in the database, to allow access to administrative database and server administration commands in the future. This can be accomplished with the "CreateUser" directive in the Nebulae.cfg file:

CreateUser = admin,pass,100

This command will create a user names "admin", with password "pass" and userlevel 100 the next time the server is started. We have authored a Director tool called "DatabaseAdministrator" that is available in the DOWNLOAD section of the Nebulae site to make it easier to manipulate and administrate the database contents. But you can also use any other Director movie to interface with the database, as long as it uses the supported DBObject commands.