Introduction

The purpose of this post is to give an overview of background, technical architecture, features offered by VoltDB. Traditional RDBMS systems like Oracle, Sybase are designed decades back and have architecture based on the needs of their times.

Michael Stonebraker and his team from MIT have taken a closer look at the current database needs such as High Throughput and Low Latency for query execution, high scalability, high availability, durability, real time analytics, data integration and architected VoltDB accordingly.

The Big Data requirements has spurred innovation in data storage and retrieval using NoSQL database solutions like Cassandra, MongoDB, etc. But VoltDB distinguishes itself from them as a NewSQL solution which is truly a RDBMS with support for ACID properties.

VoltDB Architecture

VoltDB has a highly-scalable, distributed, shared nothing architecture. VoltDB has innovated its architecture and design by exploiting the current hardware and software trends such as multi-core processors, size of memory and MapReduce style. distributed query execution, etc.

In traditional RDBMS product’s throughput and latency are affected by factors such as logging, latching, locking and buffer management. By serializing processing VoltDB avoids these issues. Both scale-up (bigger memory, more cpu-cores) and scale-out architecture is supported.

In scale out architecture, data is stored in partitions residing in different nodes but the organization of data is transparent to the application. Certain query execution plan (where data doesn’t reside in the same partition) MapReduce style. query plans are used this speeds up the query execution by order of magnitude.

Though VoltDB comes with access libraries for various languages such as Java, C#, Python, C++, PHP, HTTP/JSON, Ruby, Node.js, etc.