1 min read
In the Volt Active Data ebook, “Fast Data: Smart and at Scale,” Ryan Betts and I outline what we have found, through years of work and collective experience, to be tried-and-true design patterns and recipes for fast data. High-speed transactional applications or…
1 min read
Introduction Last year we published YCSB benchmarks that compared IBM SoftLayer with Amazon Web Services. This generated a lot of interest from lots of different folks in the cloud community. There was so much interest we decided to do it again with…
1 min read
When you evaluate a database to use in your application stack, you usually look at the features, the performance, the price, and the fit. You take for granted that the data is correct, that the features work as documented, and that the…
1 min read
Continuous integration (CI) has become a fundamental process in many software-based companies in recent years. Fortunately, frameworks such as Jenkins do most of the heavy lifting and make it flexible for the engineering team to examine and improve the process. With the…
1 min read
My name is Yiqun Zhang and I worked as a software engineering intern on the SQL core team at Volt Active Data during the summer. The experience of working with so many smart and talented people was so much fun. I was…
1 min read
One of the key tasks during initialization of a Volt Active Data cluster is determining cluster topology. The topology includes placement of the partition masters and replicas on physical Volt Active Data nodes. Once determined, the topology does not change unless node…
1 min read
A couple of weeks ago, an interesting issue came up in the field. The symptom was that the resident set size (RSS) of the Volt Active Data process would keep growing when the database was idle. The symptom only manifested itself on…
1 min read
Trying to choose a database to solve a problem (or a whole set of them)? Here’s a quick rundown of the advantages – and disadvantages – of NoSQL versus NewSQL. Choosing the right tool for the job at hand is 80 percent…
1 min read
The sale and subsequent closure of FoundationDB cut short something of a grand experiment. FoundationDB, conceived as a Key-Value store, had decided to add flexibility in the form of programming and query-model “Layers” on top of its core KV store. First up…
1 min read
Working on distributed systems is fun, but not easy! As a software engineer at Volt Active Data, a big chunk of my time is spent testing software on a cluster of machines as part of new feature development and also for customer…
1 min read
The Lambda Architecture defines a robust framework for ingesting streams of fast data while providing efficient real-time and historical analytics. In Lambda, immutable data flows in one direction: into the system. The architecture’s main goal is to execute OLAP-type processing faster –…
1 min read
My name is Yetian Xia. I worked as a software engineering intern at Volt Active Data during the summer, working with the core team. My favorite project was optimizing the performance of deleting entries from a low-cardinality non-unique tree index. Index is…