What is VoltDB?
Thank you for your interest in VoltDB!
VoltDB provides reliable data services for today's demanding applications. A distributed, horizontally-scalable, ACID-compliant database that provides streaming, storage, and real-time analytics for applications that benefit from strong consistency, high throughput and low, predictable latency.
VoltDB and Open Source
VoltDB offers the fully open source, AGPL3-licensed Community Edition of VoltDB through GitHub here:
https://github.com/voltdb/voltdb/
Trials of the enterprise edition of VoltDB are available from the VoltDB website at the following URL:
The Community Edition has full application compatibility and provides everything needed to run a real-time, in-memory SQL database with datacenter-local redundancy and snapshot-based disk persistence.
The commercial editions add operational features to support industrial strength durability and availability, including per-transaction disk-based persistence, multi-datacenter replication, elastic online expansion, live online upgrade, etc..
For more information, please visit the VoltDB website.
VoltDB Branches and Tags
The latest development branch is master. We develop features on branches and merge to master when stable. While master is usually stable, it should not be considered production-ready and may also have partially implemented features.
Code that corresponds to released versions of VoltDB are tagged "voltdb-X.X" or "voltdb-X.X.X". To build corresponding OSS VoltDB versions, use these tags.
Building VoltDB
Information on building VoltDB from this source repository is maintained in a GitHub wiki page available here:
https://github.com/VoltDB/voltdb/wiki/Building-VoltDB
First Steps
From the directory where you installed VoltDB, you can either use bin/{command} or add the bin folder to your path so you can use the VoltDB commands anywhere. For example:
PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)/bin/"
voltdb --version
Then, initialize a root directory and start a single-server database. By default the root directory is created in your current working directory. Or you can use the --dir option to specify a location:
voltdb init [--dir ~/mydb]
voltdb start [--dir ~/mydb] [--background]
To start a SQL console to enter SQL DDL, DML or DQL:
sqlcmd
To launch the web-based VoltDB Management Console (VMC), open a web browser and connect to localhost on port 8080 (unless there is a port conflict): http://localhost:8080.
To stop the running VoltDB cluster, use the shutdown command. For commercial customers, the database contents are saved automatically by default. For open-source users, add the --save argument to manually save the contents of your database:
voltadmin shutdown [--save]
Then you can simply use the start command to restart the database:
voltdb start [--dir ~/mydb] [--background]
Further guidance can be found in the tutorial: https://docs.voltdb.com/tutorial/. For more on the CLI, see the documentation: https://docs.voltdb.com/UsingVoltDB/clivoltdb.php.
Next Steps
Examples
You can find application examples in the "examples" directory inside this VoltDB kit. The Voter app ("examples/voter") is a great example to start with. See the README to learn what it does and how to get it running.
The "examples" directory provides additional examples and a README explaining how to run them.
Tutorial
The VoltDB Tutorial walks you through building and running your first VoltDB application.
https://docs.voltdb.com/tutorial/
Documentation
The Using VoltDB guide and supporting documentation is comprehensive and easy to use. It's a great place for broad understanding or to look up something specific.
Go Full Cloud
For information on using VoltDB in the Cloud, see the VoltDB Kubernetes Administrator's Guide.
https://docs.voltdb.com/KubernetesAdmin/
What's Included
If you have installed VoltDB from the distribution kit, you now have a directory containing this README file and several subdirectories, including:
- bin - Scripts for starting VoltDB, bulk loading data, as well as interacting with and managing the running database. Including:
- bin/voltdb - Start a VoltDB process.
- bin/voltadmin - CLI to manage a running cluster.
- bin/sqlcmd - SQL console.
- doc - Documentation, tutorials, and java-doc
- examples - Sample programs demonstrating the use of VoltDB
- lib - Third party libraries
- tools - XML schemas, monitoring plugins, and other tools
- voltdb - the VoltDB binary software itself including:
- log4j files - Logging configuration.
- voltdbclient-version.jar - Java/JVM client for connecting to VoltDB, including native VoltDB client and JDBC driver.
- voltdb-version.jar - The full VoltDB binary, including platform-specific native libraries embedded within the jar. This is a superset of the client code and can be used as a native client driver or JDBC driver.
Commercial VoltDB Differences
VoltDB offers sandboxes and a pre-built trial version of VoltDB for application developers who want to try out the product. See the VoltDB website for more information.
Getting Help & Providing Feedback
If you have any questions or comments about VoltDB, we encourage you to reach out to the VoltDB team and community through our public Slack channel.
Licensing
This program is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3. See the accompanying LICENSE file for details on your rights and responsibilities with regards to the use and redistribution of VoltDB software.