“Why is this so slow?” Have you put your application into testing (you did this before going to production, right?) and wondered why you’re not getting VoltDB’s world-class performance? The problem might be with the SQL execution plan.

This article shows you how to look at the SQL execution plans and use the information to tune your application.

Getting the plans at compile time

In VoltDB, you can get execution plan information when you compile your stored procedures or later, when the database is up and running. When you build the application catalog using the voltdb compile command, the console … Read more

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 the second post in a two-part series entitled The Big Data Value Continuum.  You can find Part 1 here.

Recall that in the world of Big Data, our fundamental assumption is that data no longer resides in a static database for its entire life.  Big data demands that we squeak out the most value from the data that we have at every stage of its lifecycle.  And, oh yeah, we’re collecting way more today than we did yesterday, so get ready for that challenge, too.

Part 2: Putting the Pieces Together

Let’s build on the concepts we … Read more

I am often asked about the value of flash memory in OLTP database applications.  This blog post discusses flash technology in this context.  First, I discuss the future of flash in general; then I turn to flash (and other future storage technologies) in the context of a main memory DBMS, such as VoltDB.

The Future of Flash

Flash memory is clearly a “moving window”, since its price and performance are changing quickly.  Historically, flash could only be written a few thousand times, before it would “wear out” and have to be replaced.  This drawback seems to have been eliminated … Read more

The purpose of this blog posting is to discuss strategies for handling decision support queries in Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.  First, I want to talk about the two classes of OLTP applications that I see in the marketplace.

The first is the traditional OLTP market that has been present for years, and is typified by purchasing Wall Street stocks.  A collection of humans (stock brokers or end-users over the web) interact with an OLTP system to trade securities.  The brokerage house (and end users for that matter) also want to run decision support queries to learn about historical trends … Read more

This is the first post in a two-part series entitled The Big Data Value Continuum.  You can find Part 2 here.

Technology markets are challenging enough to understand but, when you throw in the added noise that typically accompanies early markets, gaining real insights can be next to impossible.  It is not unusual to have ten or more vendors in a particular segment and adjacent segments, and countless products attempting to solve similar customer problems. Needless to say, tech markets are rarely clear in the beginning.

Big Data is just such a market today. One of the challenges we … Read more

Last week I gave a webinar entitled OldSQL vs. NoSQL vs. NewSQL for New OLTP.  If you missed the live webinar and want to view the recorded version, you’ll find it here (you may need to scroll down to find it).  Below is a list of questions that live webinar attendees asked, in no particular order.  If you have follow-on questions, reply to this post and I or someone else from VoltDB will answer them.

Webinar Questions and Answers

1.  Does VoltDB run on Scale up NUMA like systems or is it designed primarily to run on scale out clusters?… Read more