game programming question (network based)

[Violenza]

my friend and i have done some simple game programming in the past and would like to venture into some network game development. we were brainstorming and came up with some questions.

when programming a tcp/ip game all info is transmitted via fixed-size packets. what if i needed to send a packet to the server regarding the game state but needed to send more info than the packet could hold? break it up over multiple packets?

when using the winsock control and the send data method basically what you are sending is a string of text to the receivign computer. how is this really sufficient to handle a fast paced game? if its a string that we have to hold our game-state info in, that means we'll have to parse everystring before we can use it

that sounds like a lot of overhead PER packet

or is there a better way to do this entirely?

what i mean by game-state is the packet would be sending info about all objects nearby, their coords, their vector, etc, etc

thanks for any input =)

[Violenza]

and what if i want the client thats logging into my server to access a database on that server? i have to do all my SQL queries in a line of text thats will be parsed on the server? sounds like a huge pain =P