VoltDB's End of Summer Engineering Update

It's been a busy summer here at VoltDB! Since spring the VoltDB Engineering team has released VoltDB four times (we're operating on 3 week sprints) and delivered numerous product and performance enhancements.

Some of the major features we've recently released include:

• Pause-less rejoin of failed nodes. Failed nodes can now be rejoined to the k-safe cluster without significant impact to the operational throughput of the cluster. This feature is available in the Enterprise edition of VoltDB.

• Significant performance improvements around ad hoc SQL, which is SQL executed outside of stored procedures, via the @AdHoc system procedure invocation or through JDBC.   Some of our internal workloads saw three orders of magnitude improvement in ad hoc throughput.

• SQL LIKE support.  Provides the ability to search for a specified pattern in a column.

• CSV Loader.   The ability to load data into VoltDB from a text file containing comma-separated tabular values.

• New PHP Client. A new lightweight C-extension-based PHP client with a streamlined interface.

We've also introduced numerous other features including:

• Column Functions: Date Extract functions, String functions, with more to come!
• Counting/Rank index performance improvements upwards of 1000%.  Helpful for leaderboard and ranking-type queries.
• New "explain” query plan system stored procedure.
• Java Date and Timestamp are now valid parameter types for VoltDB stored procedures.
• VoltDB allows broader use of strings as arguments. It is now possible to pass numeric values, such as integers and floating point values, to stored procedures as the string representations of those values.
• Ability to Batch Multiple Ad Hoc SQL statements as one transactional request.
• Large Catalog Updates
• Java Client Support for arrays of VARBINARY (arrays of arrays of bytes)
• Ability to partition tables on VARBINARY columns
• Integration of Partitioning with the Schema DDL
• New Debian Installation Package

Be sure to download the latest kit containing these enhancements as well as many others, here: http://voltdb.com/products-services/downloads