Author Archive

Posts by Douglas Patten 

Leaderboards: Optimization for Ranking-Related Queries

October 5th, 2012 in Community
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My name is Xin Jia and I was one of the student interns at VoltDB this summer. For one of my projects, I worked on a feature that greatly improved the performance of ranking-related queries.

Finding the rank of an entry in a sorted list of data is a common operation in a lot of applications. Take a leaderboard within gaming application as an example: it is common to have a scoreboard that keeps track of users’ scores. Questions like, “what are the top-n users and their corresponding scores?”, or “what is the rank of a certain user?” are … Read more

 

VoltDB Explain Plan Command and Planner Testing Tool

September 12th, 2012 in VoltDB Products
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My name is Zheng Li, a UMass Lowell graduate student. I spent the summer as an internship at VoltDB. Over the summer, I primarily worked on two VoltDB features, both related to query plans. The features are:

  1. Explain plan command
  2. Planner testing tool

A query plan is an ordered set of steps used to access or modify information in a SQL relational database management system (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_plan).  Understanding query plans is important because the first plan chosen to execute will directly affect the query execution time. Both … Read more

 

VoltDB – Simplified CSV Loader

August 23rd, 2012 in Community
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My name is Xin Jia, a Brown University student, and I’ve spent the summer interning at VoltDB. One of the first projects that I worked on this summer was a CSV Loader with fellow intern Zheng Li.

Prior to VoltDB 2.8, loading data from CSV files into the database could be a challenging task, especially for newcomers. There were a few steps that needed to be taken: you would need to write a client program to parse the CSV data, handle errors and ultimately invoke a stored procedure to insert the data into the database. Extra care needed to be … Read more