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DiceDB

Realtime Leaderboard

In the world of gaming, leaderboards are essential for tracking player rankings and improving engagement. DiceDB, an in-memory datastore with realtime reactivity, is an excellent choice for implementing fast, reliable, and scalable leaderboards. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of creating a gaming leaderboard using DiceDB CLI commands, without relying on any SDK.

Prerequisites:

Setup DiceDB - Server and CLI

If you haven’t installed DiceDB yet, follow the instructions in the official repository to set up DiceDB on your system and start the server.

The easiest way to get started with DiceDB is using Docker by running the following command.

docker run dicedb/dicedb

The above command will start the DiceDB server running locally on the port 7379 and you can connect to it using DiceDB CLI and SDKs.

Now that the server is running, install the DiceDB CLI to seamlessly talk to the database. To install DiceDB CLI, just run the following command on your machine.

pip install dicedb-cli

Connecting to DiceDB

First, open your terminal and connect to your DiceDB instance:

dice-cli

To test that the connection is well established fire the PING command and you should get PONG in return.

Ingesting the stats

Let’s start by ingesting some sample data into DiceDB. We’ll use the JSON.SET command to store player scores. Once the CLI connects to the database, fire the following commands to ingest player scores.

JSON.SET match:1:player:1 $ {"name": "aquaman", "score": 5}
JSON.SET match:1:player:2 $ {"name": "batman", "score": 5}
JSON.SET match:1:player:3 $ {"name": "cyclops", "score": 2}
JSON.SET match:1:player:4 $ {"name": "deadpool", "score": 9}

Note: If you were using Redis, then you’d need to use Sorted Set to build the leaderboard but with DiceDB, you can use the JSON.SET command to store the metadata and score against the player as a top-level key, value pair.

Querying the data

Open another terminal window, connect to the DiceDB with CLI. To get the leaderboard, you need to simply query the DiceDB using the QWATCH command.

QWATCH "SELECT $key, $value FROM 'match_1:%' ORDER BY $value.score DESC"

This command will keep emitting the list of key, value pairs in the descending order of the value (score).

Updating Player Scores

As players complete games, you’ll need to update their scores. Use the JSON.SET command again to update the score of the player and set it to the new value.

Say, we increase the score of cyclops to a 10, then the command would be

JSON.SET match:1:player:3 $.score 10

Realtime Leaderboard

Given that we have used QWATCH command to get the leaderboard, any time the data is updated, it will re-evaluate the query and emitting the list of key, value pairs in the descending order of the value (score).

Thus your client will get the leaderboard in realtime, without having to poll or query the data periodically.

Conclusion

DiceDB provides a powerful and efficient solution for implementing gaming leaderboards. By using DiceDB CLI commands, you can create fast, scalable, and feature-rich leaderboards for your games, without having to

  1. periodically poll for the data, or
  2. knowing the internal data data structures like Sorted Set.