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

We had a great turnout for the VoltDB for SQL Developers webinar on July 19th. The audience was engaged and asked many good questions.  We had attendees from all over the US, Canada and Germany.  I’d like to thank all those who attended and asked questions, and those who have contacted us since then with additional questions and feedback.

There were several questions in particular about partitioning and working with stored procedures, which hit upon what I think are the two most important concepts.

Partitioning enables scalability and throughput, by distributing both data storage and transaction processing across the hardware … 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

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

This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I will explore various aspects of On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP).   In this post, I’ll examine main memory storage as an alternative to disk for traditional and “New OLTP” systems.

Traditional relational DBMSs, Hadoop and most of the NoSQL offerings store their data on disk.  In contrast, VoltDB is a main memory DBMS.

First, it should be noted that main memory is getting very cheap.  It is straightforward to put 50 Gbytes of memory on a $5,000 server.  Beefy servers these days have 10 times that amount. Moreover, many … Read more