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The NewSQL Database You'll Never Outgrow

VoltDB is a blazingly fast relational database system.  It is specifically designed for modern software applications that are pushed beyond their limits by high velocity data sources. This new generation of systems – real-time feeds, machine-generated data, micro-transactions, high performance content serving – requires database throughput that can reach millions of operations per second.  What’s more, the applications that use this data must be able to scale on demand, provide flawless fault tolerance and give real-time visibility into the data that drives business value.  
 

Millions of Database Operations Per Second

The volume and velocity of data are exploding, fueled by social applications, sensor automation, mobile networking, and other data-intensive forces. Moore's Law signals massive data tier scale-outs as networks and servers become faster and less expensive.  Enabling those scale-outs is a new generation of relational DBMSs, led by VoltDB, designed to exploit networked and virtualized computing environments.  VoltDB provides the throughput, scale and accuracy needed to handle high velocity data applications.

  

 

One Size Does Not Fit All

Relational DBMSs are the workhorses of IT, powering a huge installed base of operational systems worldwide. In the past several years, however, data velocity and volume have become so vast that general purpose RDBMSs simply cannot keep up (and they make the costs of keeping up prohibitively high).  In response, data infrastructures are evolving rapidly toward specialized database engines that are designed to handle specific workloads and operations; and they do so orders of magnitude faster than general purpose database systems.

VoltDB is a specialized engine designed to handle an increasing range of high velocity data applications.  Its shared nothing scale-out architecture allows VoltDB users to leverage inexpensive, virtualized computing infrastructures, including popular cloud service platforms.

  


 

 

 

A View Through the Looking Glass

In 2008, a team of researchers led by Mike Stonebraker published a seminal paper in the ACM SIGMOD entitled "OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There".  The paper exposed key sources of processing overhead that plague disk-based RDBMS products, and concluded that removing those overheads and running a database in main memory would yield orders of magnitude improvements in database performance.  Along with other noteworthy research of that period, Through the Looking Glass signaled a sea change of thinking around in-memory transactional systems.

  

 

 

 

From Academic Prototype to Professional Product

VoltDB is the productization of the H-Store academic research project, a collaboration of senior computer scientists from MIT (including Mike Stonebraker), Yale University and Brown University.  The original H-Store team also included a senior engineer from Vertica, Inc. named John Hugg.

Informed by a wealth of timely research, H-Store's objective was to deliver a natively scalable, fault tolerant RDBMS prototype that would run wildly faster than its general purpose counterparts.  That objective and many others have now been realized and are at the core of VoltDB database products.

Today, Mike Stonebraker is VoltDB's CTO and John Hugg is a senior engineer on VoltDB's R&D team.

  

 

 

 

 

If you are new to VoltDB, we invite you to explore the following resources. Many users have found it helpful to begin with an introductory white paper or webinar (options 1 & 2).  If you're ready to download software, choose option 3 for our Downloads page, and don't forget to also download a copy of Getting Started with VoltDB from the Documentation section.  If you need help, options 4 & 5 will get you to our forums or put you directly in touch with someone on our team.  We are here to assist you quickly and efficiently.
 
Read the VoltDB Technical Overview
This white paper covers VoltDB architectural concepts, identifies popular use cases and positions VoltDB within the broader database landscape. It’s provides a great introduction to VoltDB.

Watch a VoltDB Jumpstart webinar
VoltDB for SQL Developers covers the fundamental building blocks of creating VoltDB databases and applications. Choose from our library of technical webinars to get started quickly.

Download VoltDB software and documentation
Get the latest builds of VoltDB Community Edition and eval copies of VoltDB Enterprise Edition, along with the documentation you need to get started building VoltDB apps.

Join the VoltDB community forums
The VoltDB forums are a great resource for getting fast answers to questions on a wide range of VoltDB topics. Join the community and post your own questions to our engineering team.

Get engineering help for your POC
Planning to take VoltDB for a serious test drive? If you’ve got an application in mind and want to get up the curve quickly, we want to help. Let’s get your POC headed in the right direction now.