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

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

Point 1: Demonstrate SQL can be fast. Say what you want about our numbers and benchmark, but the language used to manipulate data was SQL and it clearly wasn’t bottlenecking VoltDB performance. We wanted to show the assumption that dropping SQL is a precondition for performance and scalability is false.

Point 2: VoltDB competes well on simple workloads like the key-value puts and gets, as well as complex workloads like our TPC-C like benchmark.

How … Read more

Edit on 6/2/10: Check out the follow up Benchmarking FAQ blog post with links to code.

The NoSQL movement was born of the need to scale data management with predicable cost. My subjective summary of the NoSQL credo: provide simpler core functionality, scale horizontally, leverage redundancy, expect and handle failures. These systems became known as NoSQL because SQL and schema was often given up for flexibility and simplicity. The name came about even though SQL was never the primary complaint; scalability was.

VoltDB was born to solve similar problems. Provide horizontal scalability at a cost per transaction that anyone … Read more