VoltDB 3.0 introduces the use of JSON-encoded columns to allow more flexibility in how you structure and interact with your data. New SQL functions and index capabilities let you work more naturally with JSON data while maintaining the efficiency and transactional consistency of a relational database.

How?  A VoltDB JSON Example

Let’s assume that you want to implement a single sign-on (SSO) application using VoltDB.  You wish to store the login session for a set of different online sites under a common username.  Each login session could hold different user state, simple data values or possibly more complex structures. Additionally, … Read more

The VoltDB engineering team is thrilled to announce that VoltDB 3.0 is now available!  Over the past six months we’ve added a ton of features to VoltDB 3.0. This blog post lists the highlights, but that just scratches the surface. Look for future blog posts to dive into specific areas of version 3 functionality.

So let’s jump into what’s new in VoltDB 3.0…

Even Faster

VoltDB 3.0 has lower latency and more throughput than the VoltDB v2.x release.  We spent much of the past year re-engineering the transaction coordination architecture to minimize the communication between cluster nodes during transaction processing … Read more

This is part 2 (of 2) of my Programming VoltDB – Easy, Flexible and Ultra-fast series. Blog post, part 1, showed how to build a VoltDB application using ad hoc queries and achieving thousands of transactions a second. It also showed how converting that logic to use VoltDB stored procedures allowed you to parallelize query execution and achieve 100,000+ transactions a second on a single node. In this blog post I’ll talk about scaling beyond 100,000 transactions per second by creating a VoltDB clustered database.

There are primarily two reasons why you would want to run VoltDB as a … Read more

The VoltDB Engineering Team is excited to announce the availability of the VoltDB v3.0 BETA.
The following provides a brief overview and details on how you can download this very important release.
What is VoltDB v3.0?

VoltDB v3.0 offers a set of user-visible features, including new SQL, indexable column functions, improved ad hoc SQL execution performance, export enhancements, online schema changes, and a more streamlined application-development process.  Under the covers, VoltDB v3.0 includes a new transaction-coordination architecture that reduces latency and improves transaction throughput.

We’ve worked hard over the past six months to reduce overhead within VoltDB by streamlining transaction … Read more

Announcing VoltDB v3.0 – Preview Release

The next major release of VoltDB, version 3.0, is right around the corner.  In anticipation of this release, we’re announcing a preview release of the v3.0 offering, available immediately.  A brief overview and details on how you can preview this exciting release is found below.
What is VoltDB v3.0?

The VoltDB v3.0 release includes a set of user-visible features, including new SQL (specifically column functions), ad hoc SQL execution performance, Export enhancements, online schema changes, and a more streamlined application development process.  Under the covers, however, VoltDB v3.0 includes a new transaction coordination architecture … Read more

Making an Impact: VoltDB Engineering Interns

Summer went by too fast in New England!  We are already missing our two engineering internship students, Xin Jia from Brown University and Zheng li from University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

During their internship, Xin and Zheng worked on numerous projects, explored new ideas, and helped accelerate the launch of product features. In short, they were big contributors to VoltDB.  Some of their projects have already released in VoltDB 2.8.1. Xin worked on implementing several SQL functions as well as implementing counting index functionality to support efficient and fast rank related queries (look for his … Read more

It’s been a busy summer here at VoltDB! Since spring the VoltDB Engineering team has released VoltDB four times (we’re operating on 3 week sprints) and delivered numerous product and performance enhancements.

Some of the major features we’ve recently released include:

• Pause-less rejoin of failed nodes. Failed nodes can now be rejoined to the k-safe cluster without significant impact to the operational throughput of the cluster. This feature is available in the Enterprise edition of VoltDB.

• Significant performance improvements around ad hoc SQL, which is SQL executed outside of stored procedures, via the @AdHoc system procedure invocation or through

… Read more

You may believe that the only way to interact with VoltDB is through Java stored procedures.  To achieve maximum throughput, VoltDB stored procedures is the way to go.  You can achieve upwards of 100,000 transactions per second on a single node.  However, you can also achieve significant throughput by interacting with VoltDB conversationally, through ad hoc SQL statements, avoiding the need to pre-compile stored procedures.

This blog will discuss several approaches to interacting with VoltDB programmatically and cover the performance, in terms of transaction throughput, that you should expect with each approach.

Ad Hoc Query

To VoltDB, an ad hoc … Read more

I’m very happy to announce the release of VoltDB 2.5.  Consistent with prior releases, 2.5 includes one major new feature, Database Replication, combined with other significant work in and around the VoltDB core engine.  I’d summarize our 2.5 engineering investments as follows:

• Database Replication.  As I’d previously described here, Database Replication is the headline feature of 2.5 (until recently, we referred to the feature as WAN replication).  It allows VoltDB databases to be automatically replicated within and across data centers.  Available in the VoltDB Enterprise Edition, Database Replication ensures that every database transaction applied to a VoltDB database is

… Read more

The subject of my last blog post was an introduction to VoltDB Replication, one of the major product additions that we’ve been working on.  Well, with this post, I’m happy to announce that we’ve recently pre-released VoltDB Replication to selected users to perform beta-level validation!

VoltDB WAN replication involves duplicating the contents of one database cluster (known as the master) to another database cluster (known as the replica). The process of retrieving completed transactions from the master and applying them to the replica is managed by a separate process called the Disaster Recovery (DR) agent.

The DR agent is critical … Read more