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

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

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

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

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

We’ve recently put up a series of blog posts describing the components of a Spring-MVC web application, including VoltDB as the database, that saves votes being called in for talent show contestants. Today I’ll talk about what happened when we benchmarked the Voter application on Amazon’s cloud platform.  The short story – running on a suitable EC2 configuration (see details below), we achieved 686,000 TPS for a Spring-enabled application using VoltDB.

The Benchmark Application

I’ll start by summarizing the aforementioned blog posts, but you are welcome to read them:

Using the Spring @Schedule Annotation, Using the Spring Converter API … Read more

On June 18 I gave a talk to the Javascript meet-up group in Hamburg, Germany.  It was a very enjoyable evening.   I’d like to thank Martin Kleppe for organizing the event, and the meet-up group members for investing an evening to learn more about Node.js and VoltDB.

The group asked some interesting questions during the Q&A part of my talk and in the additional discussions afterward.  Below are some of the questions I remember, along with written responses.

… Read more

Last night I gave a talk and had an engaging conversation with the TriangleJS meet-up group in Raleigh, NC.  I’d like to thank my hosts at WebAssign for providing such a nice facility, Lucas Myers for managing the logistics of the meet-up and, most of all, the group members who invested an evening to learn more about VoltDB.

Although my talk was somewhat geared toward recent work we’ve done with Node.js, the follow-on discussion covered a wide range of technical topics ranging from database partitioning, single- and multi-part queries, query routing, site execution and database high availability.  It was interesting … Read more