VoltDB 3.0 introduces the use of JSON-encoded columns to allow more flexibility in how you structure and interact with your data. New SQL functions and index capabilities let you work more naturally with JSON data while maintaining the efficiency and transactional consistency of a relational database.

How?  A VoltDB JSON Example

Let’s assume that you want to implement a single sign-on (SSO) application using VoltDB.  You wish to store the login session for a set of different online sites under a common username.  Each login session could hold different user state, simple data values or possibly more complex structures. Additionally, … Read more

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

John Hugg was talking with me today about a way to reduce the complexity of error checking in a stored procedure and how rarely it is used. VoltDB’s stored procedures let you set “expectations” on each SQL statement. Those expectations can eliminate several lines of code leading to shorter, readable and more reliable stored procedures.

Consider the following sample:

Example.DDL

LoginProc1.java

LoginProc2.java

LoginProc1 checks for a row count and returns either a 0 or a 1 if the username and password combination could not be found. LoginProc2 sets an expectation that the results of voltExecuteSQL() will return exactly one … Read more

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

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

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