I haven't peaked at the source for either DayZ or ARMA 2 but I feel like taking a stab at this one anyway.
To serial number every item with a unique ID would be incredibly taxing in every aspect. This would be the case, I believe, because best practice (I assume) would be to give each item a generic item code (which I'm sure the game all ready does) then give it a unique item code, like a serial number. That unique item code would then be bound to your account in the central server.
To parse through a huge (re: gigantifuckingnormous) database that comprised not only every item in the entire server you are on but every item laying on the ground as well and comparing those numbers against the player database to see who owns it (if anyone) would be incredibly taxing. Not to mention if anything desynchronizes it could be a server wide disaster; a "dogs fucking cats" type of calamity. Then, regardless of these efforts, a new dupe method would be found. You can take that to the bank bro.
I think the best bet here is to wait for the standalone and try to mitigate these problems more when he's got access to source. Over riding a bagillion methods to stop something that most likely won't be stopped anyway is a bit superfluous.
Not if the database/server is designed with extensibility in mind. You can modularize systems like this to handle this. Rather than having one database system handle all of this information, you can have several components process different kinds of requests and send data to the database.
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Not if the database/server is designed with extensibility in mind. You can modularize systems like this to handle this. Rather than having one database system handle all of this information, you can have several components process different kinds of requests and send data to the database.