We’ve never been super big on flagrantly tooting our own horn, but we recently had a customer who switched from Redis to Volt, and given the frequency with which things like this have happened over the last few years – ie, the (future) customer tries one database solution, runs into series issues with it, then switches to Volt and never goes back (and we mean NEVER, our customer retention rate has been close to 100% for 10 years) – we thought we were due a blog like this that really captures at least one of the reasons why this happens so often.
Wow – that was a long sentence.
Okay – take a breath and read on…
Table Of Contents
The “why”
Businesses need database solutions that can manage data accurately, efficiently, and in real time. The ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) principles are foundational for ensuring data integrity, particularly in transactional systems. However, for many organizations, getting their data platform to adhere to ACID requirements can create significant challenges—challenges that grow as their business scales.
Read on to explore why ACID requirements cause so many issues and how one customer overcame these problems by switching from Redis to Volt Active Data.
The ACID conundrum
The ACID properties were designed to ensure reliable transaction processing:
- Atomicity: Ensures that all parts of a transaction are completed successfully or none are.
- Consistency: Guarantees that a transaction brings the database from one valid state to another.
- Isolation: Ensures that concurrently executing transactions do not interfere with each other.
- Durability: Ensures that once a transaction is committed, it remains so even in the face of a system failure.
While these principles are critical for transactional systems, they can impose challenges on databases that were not originally designed to fully support them. Many databases, like Redis, offer high performance and flexibility but fall short of meeting ACID requirements natively. This gap often shifts the burden of implementing ACID compliance onto the application layer, as one of our customers discovered.
The Redis challenge: ACID compliance at a cost
Redis is widely appreciated for its speed and simplicity, particularly for use cases like caching, real-time analytics, and session management. However, it was not designed with ACID compliance in mind.
For our customer, this limitation resulted in two significant issues:
- Increased application complexity: Without built-in support for ACID transactions, the customer had to implement these guarantees in the application layer. This added substantial complexity to their codebase. Developers had to write custom logic to ensure data integrity, such as managing retries, handling partial failures, and coordinating distributed transactions. This not only increased development time but also introduced the risk of bugs and inconsistencies. Also, testing this additional logic was almost impossible,
- Scaling difficulties: The added complexity in the application layer made the overall architecture harder to scale. As the business grew, scaling the system to handle increased data volumes and higher transaction rates became a major bottleneck. Redis’s eventual consistency model further complicated matters, as ensuring real-time consistency across a growing dataset required additional overhead.
Why do ACID requirements create these challenges?
The customer’s experience highlights a broader truth: ACID requirements often cause problems because they demand a high level of coordination and precision. Let’s break down why this happens:
- Concurrency management: Ensuring isolation in a highly concurrent environment is a non-trivial challenge. Without a database that can handle this efficiently, developers must write complex locking or queuing mechanisms, which can lead to deadlocks and performance bottlenecks.
- Distributed systems: In modern architectures, data is often distributed across multiple nodes or regions. Achieving consistency and durability in such setups requires robust mechanisms for synchronization and replication—tasks that many databases struggle with.
- Fault tolerance: Durability guarantees require the system to handle failures gracefully, ensuring that committed transactions are never lost. This involves managing transaction logs, checkpoints, and recovery processes, which can be resource-intensive and error-prone when implemented outside the database.
- Latency vs. consistency trade-offs: Some databases prioritize low latency over strict consistency, making it difficult to meet ACID guarantees without sacrificing performance. This trade-off is particularly problematic for real-time applications where both speed and accuracy are critical.
Redis vs. Volt Active Data: A Comparative Snapshot
| Feature | Redis | Volt Active Data |
| ACID Compliance | Partial (requires application support) | Full native support |
| Scalability | Challenging with complex workloads | Seamless with distributed architecture |
| Real-Time Performance | High for simple use cases | High for complex, transactional use cases |
| Application Simplicity | Requires custom logic | Simplified by database features |
Lessons Learned
For organizations relying on real-time data processing, the choice of database can significantly impact both short-term development efficiency and long-term scalability. As our customer’s experience shows, relying on a database that does not natively support ACID transactions can lead to unintended complexity and operational challenges.
Volt Active Data’s combination of real-time performance and built-in ACID compliance proved to be a game-changer for their business, enabling them to scale efficiently while maintaining data integrity.
The Volt Active Data Solution
Recognizing these challenges, the customer decided to transition to Volt Active Data, a database solution designed to provide high performance while fully supporting ACID transactions. This switch addressed their challenges in several key ways:
- Native ACID compliance: Volt natively enforces ACID properties, eliminating the need for application-level workarounds. This significantly simplified the customer’s codebase, freeing developers to focus on building features rather than wrestling with data integrity issues.
- Improved scalability: By offloading ACID guarantees to the database layer, the customer’s architecture became leaner and more modular. Volt’s ability to process high volumes of real-time transactions across distributed environments allowed the system to scale seamlessly as the business grew.
- Operational efficiency: With fewer moving parts and reduced custom logic, the system became easier to maintain. This translated to lower operational costs and faster time-to-market for new features.
Conclusion
Toot toot!
Horn officially honked.
Give us some credit. That was hard for us. But we felt it was well-earned.
While ACID requirements are essential for maintaining data integrity, they can become a significant source of challenges when not natively supported by the database. By choosing a database solution like Volt, businesses can overcome these challenges, reducing complexity, improving scalability, and unlocking the full potential of their data.
If your organization is struggling with similar issues, it might be time to reconsider your database architecture. Let us know how we can help you simplify your systems and scale your business – or try out our new developer edition, which lets you play with Volt on your laptop (ie – click that big banner box below; come on, you know you want to).
