oltp

VoltDB is an in-memory database borne out of the H-Store research project spearheaded by Michael Stonebraker. Within that project, Michael started with the premise of building a fully transactional database with the best possible performance by using insights gathered from an in-depth study on database performance that completely removed disk access — the primary limiting factor on database performance. By removing disk access completely, we end up with a completely in-memory database where we can make additional optimizations like removing write-ahead logging, buffer management, and locks and latches....

Title and Author of Paper OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There, Harizopoulos et al. Summary Disk I/O has been the primary limiting factor in database performance for most commercial databases. However, as prices of main-memory have dropped it has become feasible to keep the entire working set of a database in RAM. With this architectural change, it makes sense to evaluate database design decisions made to avoid disk I/O to see which ones still hold promise in a main-memory world....