Our development team is currently considering using shared group data as a library of commonly used data across all our players that participate in our online asynchronous game. What are the limits to consider when a high volume of users are reading data from the same shared group data? Is this the intention of the shared group data system? Is there an alternative system within PlayFab that would be better use for 'static library' /data base of information for all users to use/ pull from?
No, shared group data was only meant to cover cases where you need to share data among a small group of players, and only for cases where they will not be trying to update it at the same time as each other. Effectively, it's just player data with no specific owning player.
Entity data is available for use with Groups, for scenarios around things like guilds/teams/clans, but again, that's a constrained total size - no more than 1,000 or so.
If you need all users to be able to read and write data, and have it have high consistency, you need an in-memory data store for that to be affordable for your project. Redis (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-cache-for-redis/cache-overview) is one of the more common system used for such features.
Thank you for getting back to me.
How about a case where the players will only be reading data from the shared group data and never writing to it? Will this result in the same issue of too many users for the shared group data?
As a current paid user for PlayFab are there any deals, for existing users of PlayFab services going into the Azure Cache for Redis?
Apologies for the delay on the response - for some reason, I wasn't notified by the AnswerHub system that there was a follow-up. Trying to have thousands of players read from a shared group data is not supported, no. SGD is specifically only an option for sharing data among small numbers of users. If a few thousand users were to read from a data store, Group Entity data (Object/File) could work, but more than that and I'd have to recommend Redis.
Azure discounts are available via the Azure sales team, and PlayFab can then be part of an Azure Enterprise Agreement (so, any Commitment on the EA could have PlayFab applied), but I'm afraid the PlayFab service itself can't provide any discounts in Azure services.
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