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

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

This is the first in a series of posts about WAN replication, a VoltDB feature that’s currently under development.  It provides a high level overview of our direction.  More detailed posts will follow as we progress through our engineering iterations.

As an in-memory transactional DBMS, VoltDB delivers breakthrough performance and scale.  Two of the product’s most significant innovations, however, are in database availability and durability:

• Availability – VoltDB delivers high availability (HA) via a synchronous multi-master feature called K-safety.  When a database is running “K-safe”, multiple (two or more) node replicas are kept transactionally consistent.  If one of those nodes

… Read more

In the previous blog post (http://newblog.voltdb.com/intro-voltdb-command-logging), Ariel Weisberg described how VoltDB’s command logging feature works. He also briefly mentioned how we replay command logs during the recovery process. In this post, I am going to focus on the replay process and discuss how VoltDB recovers from catastrophic events.

Goals of Command Logging Replay

The goals of command logging replay are pretty simple:

1. Ensure that the recovered database is 100% accurate to the last usable transaction in the command log
2. Complete the recovery process in the shortest possible time

Command logging obviously adds important new functionality to VoltDB’s infrastructure.  … Read more

In April 2010 we built a “budget cluster” to facilitate additional VoltDB testing (we already had a 12-node Dell R710 cluster). The requirement was to build a complete 6 server VoltDB cluster for less than the cost of a single R710 (much less actually). With a budget of $4,000 we decided to buy the individual parts and build the machines by hand. Everything was purchased from Amazon, NewEgg, and MonoPrice.

Parts for each Server
- CPU = AMD Phenom II X4 945 ($150.99)
- Memory (8GB) = Crucial Technology CT2CP25664AA800 4GB Memory Kit (2 x $88.99)
- Hard … Read more