Mostly modern game engines use an entity system[1], which is a form of database (global data, I guess, in as much as any database is).

The main loop then steps through each component (of which physics would be one) and lets it update the entity data for all entities.

This pattern took over from class/inheritance based architectures about 10 years ago.

There have been some suggestions that Functional Reactive Programming is a better approach. I've used it in some prototypes, but I couldn't scale it to engine-size, and I'm not aware of it having been used successfully for a full game engine.

So, this approach is pretty much it. You keep a database of state, then you run a system (the physics system, say) to update that database.

[1] http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are...

I don't have a specific answer for your question, but I know this site was written specifically for game programming patterns: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html