The VoltDB Technosphere
VoltDB is the commercial realization of the H-Store academic research project, a collaboration of senior computer scientists from MIT (led by Dr. Michael Stonebraker), Yale University, and Brown University, along with Stonebraker colleague John Hugg. H-Store's objective was to deliver a natively scalable, fault-tolerant, transactional database ready for the data revolution of the 21st century. This groundbreaking work is now available from VoltDB.
Traditional RDBMS products force a “one size fits all” approach on applications. This wasn’t a problem when data volume and velocity were manageable. Today, however, both have become so vast that general purpose RDBMSs simply cannot keep up (and they make the costs of keeping up prohibitively high).
VoltDB, by contrast, is a specialized database engine built to embrace transaction velocity. By focusing on the problem of high-velocity operations and live analytics, VoltDB can make architectural choices that more general-purpose database systems simply cannot make. These choices, combined with a forward-thinking architecture, allow VoltDB to achieve multiple orders of magnitude and more operational throughput than legacy systems on a per-machine basis.
But single-machine performance is just one dimension of performance. Designed for shared nothing clusters of commodity hardware, where each node has many cores, VoltDB embraces parallelism natively. Where traditional systems use shared locks and latches to leverage multi-core systems, VoltDB achieves concurrency through scheduling. It treats each core in a multi-node cluster as a pipeline to fill with work. In this way, near linear scalability is achieved as machines are added.
In the end, VoltDB is a system designed to handle challenging workloads and operations at tremendous speeds with limitless scalability and zero data loss. Its revolutionary, scale-out architecture allows VoltDB users to build once-thought-impossible applications that leverage inexpensive, virtualized computing infrastructures, including popular cloud service platforms.
RECOMMENDED LINKS
VoltDB Technical Overview
This white paper covers VoltDB architectural concepts, identifies popular use cases and provides information about how to get started using VoltDB.
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Alex Li
VP of Engineering
Booyah
Need some guidance on how to build your disruptive application? We're here to help. Call +1.978.528.4660 or drop us a line at info@voltdb.com
