Case Study: North Side, Inc. achieves SQL bypass and faster NLP with Actian's Versant Object Database

North Side, Inc. - Customer Case Study

North Side Inc., a Canadian MMO studio behind Bot Colony — billed as the first conversation-driven game — faced a critical challenge: its NLP engine required access to vast, hierarchical linguistic and world‑knowledge data and was extremely CPU‑intensive. Using MySQL forced costly serialization/deserialization steps and created a development bottleneck, slowing language R&D and hitting memory and performance limits.

North Side adopted the Versant Object Database to “bypass SQL,” keeping application objects intact rather than splitting them into records. The move eliminated serialization overhead, removed the DBA bottleneck, improved programmer productivity, and addressed memory and performance constraints, enabling the NLP system to run more efficiently at scale.

North Side, Inc.

Eugene Joseph

Chief Executive Officer