The database schema
Accounts, characters, content, the ecosystem and the Chronicle, with migrations, seed data and a verification pass.
Items, creatures, loot tables, spawn tables, quests, abilities and balance values are rows. That is not a preference; it is the mechanism by which most changes ship without a client download. A hard-coded balance number anywhere in this project is a bug.
The Chronicle got its own table early, before there was anything to write into it, because its columns constrain the rest. It stores actor names as they were at the time rather than as foreign keys — a guild that renames itself does not get to rewrite what it did.
The seed brings up three regions, six Callings, twenty creatures and fifty items on a fresh database, and it is idempotent, because it runs after every schema rollback as well as on every new developer machine.