VoltDB, Inc. today announced the general availability of VoltDB open source relational database management system (RDBMS) version 2.0. VoltDB is a distributed, in-memory database designed for applications that are pushed beyond their limits by high-volume data sources. The new release adds new features for developer productivity, database durability and recovery, including performance and interoperability improvements.
According to the company, VoltDB database is ideal for developers of digital ad serving, gaming, financial trading, telecommunications and other applications requiring high throughput database operations. These systems place tremendous demands on database scalability and require real-time analytics.
VoltDB is geared toward applications with high performance workloads that need scaling flexibility, Fred Holahan, chief marketing officer for VoltDB, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Most of the people who are interested in VoltDB have some form of database throughput or scaling pain. Many have evaluated NoSQL databases to address their performance/scaling problems, but don't like the idea of giving up the relational model and data consistency. VoltDB sits right in the space between traditional RDBMS products and NoSQL products, combining the best aspects of each."
Enhancements to VoltDB include a new feature called Command Logging that enables VoltDB databases to be fully recoverable in the face of severe failures caused by hardware and software crashes. Available in VoltDB Enterprise Edition, Command Logging ensures that every transaction applied to a VoltDB database is separately logged to disk. Following a system crash, VoltDB automatically assembles a recovery plan from available database snapshots and command logs, and then executes that plan to recover the database for normal operations. Command Logging includes tuning features that enable systems administrators to optimally balance database durability and performance.
In addition, VoltDB now includes performance improvements that allow distributed read operations to run faster. VoltDB's query planner has been enhanced to distribute query workloads across the VoltDB cluster, allowing those queries to execute directly on nodes where the data is stored.
Another new feature is a streaming export subsystem, which is designed to provide high performance interoperability between VoltDB and other companion data stores such as Hadoop and OLAP databases. Version 2.0 allows VoltDB's in-memory export buffer to "overflow" data to disk when downstream systems are ingesting data more slowly than VoltDB makes it available. By overflowing export data to disk, VoltDB maintains export performance while automatically managing the "impedance mismatch" that often exists among data stores with different performance profiles.
The new VoltDB release also includes JDBC support, and VoltDB Studio, a browser based tool designed to assist developers to rapidly build, test and optimize VoltDB applications.
In terms of platform requirements, VoltDB deploys natively on 64-bit Linux-based systems, says Holahan. "We're certified on CentOS versions 5.4 and 5.5, as well as Ubuntu versions 10.4 and 10.10. Developers can also built and test VoltDB applications on Mac OSX 10.6, although this is not a supported production platform. We also offer a VMware image that can be used to evaluate VoltDB on Linux, Mac and Windows platforms."
All VoltDB software products, client libraries and documentation are available for download from the company's website at www.voltdb.com.