Seriously, why haven't I heard of this before. This has to be the single most awesome feature I've ever heard of. Apparently MySQL (by adding a single flag in the config file) supports execution of statements at regular intervals. I am currently working on my online browser-based HTML5 game (Celestial Empires Online) and have gotten to the point where I need constant data manipulation in the backend (not user generated), so I started researching the best way to execute MySQL stored procedures/functions from CRON when I ran across this:

CREATE EVENT myevent    ON SCHEDULE AT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP + INTERVAL 1 HOUR    DO      UPDATE myschema.mytable SET mycol = mycol + 1;

Now the entire game backend can be ran completely within MySQL, using only apache2 as a transport system to pass data to and from mysql. No managing of connections, no persistence needed, no custom code or shell scripts. Just MySQL, PHP/Apache, and the user's web browser/&#106avascript.<br><br>The web sure has grown up :D

I'm using a $10/month rackspace cloud server running ubuntu 10.04 so all good here on usage. I just don't see why you ~wouldn't~ want the DB updates to be called from.. well.. the db directly, seems like less steps to me. MySQL query browser has a nice UI that makes things easy to find, and everything is in stored functions and procedures so that makes things even clearer.

In most games, the application layer contains at least some data and functionality that you don't need/want to store in a database backend. Updating this kind of system requires that the update procedure is done outside of the database anyway.

That said, turn-based web strategy games could well be run almost entirely in a database engine, in which case the built-in timer would be very convenient.