VoltDB Blog 

A while ago I published my Go VoltDB driver to github (https://github.com/rbetts/voltdbgo).  I wrote the driver for three reasons: to learn and write a little go; to be able to test and script against VoltDB using go; and to experiment with some different VoltDB client patterns.

We, and the community, have written several production quality drivers for VoltDB (available at http://www.voltdb.com/community/downloads.php). The go driver, however, has not been tested for production use.

With caveats complete, what’s up with voltdbgo?

Firstly, it only supports synchronous clients. VoltDB 3.0 has greatly improved response latency for synchronous interactions and the … Read more

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

NewSQL and NoSQL databases present developers with a new and interesting programming model where there are fewer connections to the database, query parallelism, partitions and an easy model for supporting new clusters. Last month I presented a webinar introducing the basics of application development using VoltDB. We had a lot of great questions and I thought it would be handy to write them up and share the answers with everyone.

Q: Can you address how you would handle joining tables that have different partition keys?  Would you not partition the tables in that case?
A:  For multi-partition queries you join … Read more

Last week in St. Louis, Dr. Michael Stonebraker gave the keynote address at the Strangeloop conference. His topic was In-Memory Databases – the Future is Now! Strangeloop is a fantastic multi-disciplinary tech conference run by Alex Miller (@puredanger) that may be the closest thing to geek heaven this side of graduate school. Alex and his crack staff, especially the ever-present Nick Cowan, kept things running very smoothly. The Peabody Opera House and its efficient staff provided an unusually opulent setting for discussions of concurrency, emerging languages, and alternative databases.

The audience, or as Javascript guru Andrew Luetgers (@lootsauce) tweeted, … 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

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

Francis Pelland is the Technical Lead for Social Game Universe developing the next generation of The Lightning Platform. The Lightning Platform lets developers build high performance, scalable data platform and provides the management, analytics and the tools to promote and grow social games. He wrote a short guide to help his team get through the transition for PHP developers moving from MySQL to VoltDB.   Here’s an excerpt:

Is there PhpMyAdmin or similar?

Yes there is!  This tool is called Web Studio.  This will allow you to navigate the tables (but not browse its content).  You can see in real … 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

One of the best parts about working for a growing start-up is the chance to leave keyboard and office behind and escape to meet users. I spent last week in San Jose at NoSQLNow – a conference designed to bring together users and vendors of “Not Only SQL” products.

VoltDB is, quite proudly, a SQL system and some passers-by raise an eyebrow as we explain this. But our modern OLTP database shares some of the
same design vocabulary as many NoSQL systems: we shard data; we run on commodity and cloud hardware; we scale horizontally; we design for update and … Read more