VoltDB is an in-memory database designed by several well-known database system researchers, including Michael Stonebraker. It is an ACID-compliant RDBMS which uses a shared nothing architecture. It includes both enterprise and community editions. VoltDB implements the design of the academic H-Store project.
VoltDB is a NewSQL relational database that supports SQL access from within pre-compiled Java stored procedures. The unit of transaction is the stored procedure, which is Java interspersed with SQL. VoltDB relies on horizontal partitioning down to the individual hardware thread to scale, k-safety (synchronous replication) to provide high availability, and a combination of continuous snapshots and command logging for durability (crash recovery).
VoltDB is designed to take full advantage of the modern computing environment:
- VoltDB uses in-memory storage to maximize throughput, avoiding costly disk access.
- Further performance gains are achieved by serializing all data access, avoiding many of the time- consuming functions of traditional databases such as locking, latching, and maintaining transaction logs.
- Scalability, reliability, and high availability are achieved through clustering and replication across multiple servers and server farms.
