VoltDB Consulting Partner and Product Reseller
Cascadia Software is a VoltDB consulting partner and product reseller. VoltDB is an extremely fast, in-memory OLTP database. We believe that over the next ten years, companies will be increasing their need to process more and more customer-facing, time-critical transactions and will therefore require a database that gives you the needed throughput and super-fast performance. VoltDB is on our short list which is why we became a partner.
The Problem
Database workhorses like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP ASE and IBM DB2 have been around for decades. The web changed the landscape with MySQL/MariaDB and Postgres. These traditional relational databases are great and have been used to power data-driven content for websites. We all use these tools everyday to get the back-end job done.
But they haven’t kept up with the speed needed in today’s world. With the advent of Google’s type-ahead suggestions producing responses in milliseconds, the status quo was upended. The speed at which transactions must occur on the internet keeps getting faster and faster. And in landscape of IoT, Big Data and mobile apps, you not only need to keep up, but you need a competitive advantage.
NoSQL and key value stores might be great to get you that speed for prototyping, but if you have ever run a NoSQL system with customer transactions for any period of time, you quickly learn you have to write ETL routines to move your data out of it and into a SQL database for reporting and analysis. And once you do that, you’ve lost your competitive advantage.
Instead of being able to interact with your customers in real-time while they are loading your web page or in your mobile app, you are back to spotting trends or reacting to your customer long after they’ve moved on.
If you are in the IoT space with an application to monitor manufacturing system output, patient health metrics or home security states, not only do seconds count, but milliseconds count.
The Solution
And that’s where VoltDB comes in. VoltDB is a secret weapon. It is the fastest, in-memory operational database and it speaks SQL, the lingua franca of databases.
You can now analyze data as it is being ingested. No more pushing it into a data lake first with a follow-behind process second. You can take action as the transaction is occurring. You can take advantage of that light speed effect.
The great thing is that if you want the raw transaction data or the analyzed results to be passed on to your data lake or other analytical system, no problem. There is a built-in streaming API that natively works with Hadoop or you can write your custom endpoint.
VoltDB is not a one-size fits all relational database platform — it is a specialized, SQL-compliant data store that is geared to solve the Fast Data problem. It is not a Big Data solution, but it plays extremely well with those tools. VoltDB’s sweet spot is to ingest and analyze data super-fast, giving you the edge where you need it.
Take a look a look at this video for a quick two-minute introduction. Go to the VoltDB website for more details. Then contact us so we can talk about how VoltDB can you help you.