VoltDB and In-Memory Databases with John Hugg

Podcast Tuesday, February 23 2016

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“There’s a lot of value in moving logic to the data rather than moving data to the logic. And the issue here is the data is a lot bigger than the logic.”

NewSQL is a class of modern relational databases that seek to provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems for OLTP, while still maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional database system. VoltDB is a NewSQL database, designed in part by Turing Award Winner Michael Stonebraker.

Today’s guest is John Hugg, a founding engineer at VoltDB. Today’s show covers the internals of VoltDB, including concepts like tunable consistency, database replication, and the advantages of a deterministic logical log.

Questions

What is unique about VoltDB?
Could you give some examples of where VoltDB would be a good fit?
What are the design challenges of embedding application logic into a database?
What are the ways developers can typically set up replication on their database?
In the context of databases, what does determinism mean?
In practice, what are the difficulties of implementing determinism on a distributed database?
As you’re developing a database, what types of tests do you run to model customer use cases?
How should systems architects decide which database to choose for their data management requirements?