Made in Heaven: Erlang + VoltDB - Henning Diedrich

VoltDB and Erlang look like the perfect match to handle high data volumes fast and painless. Both are the result of a scientific approach to a concrete problem, designed from scratch to address the new reality of parallel architectures: not only to cope with, but to use parallel hardware the right way. Both are Open Source, driven by a commercial developer. And Erlang and VoltDB are well known by everyone "in the know", yet awaiting their mainstream break through.

VoltDB is the brainchild of Michael Stonebraker, who created Ingres and Postgres, and it's his proposal for an SQL, fully ACID distributed database, specialized for online transactions. VoltDB neither reverts to key-value nor eventual consistency. It does not cover all of SQL but everything you need for typical fast, web-centric transactions. Technically VoltDB is something like a Redis for the cluster, with strong disk persistency and replication. Consequently it matches and surpasses Redis' performance, but for a much larger data set, scaling out almost linearly.

This talk presents the new native Erlang VoltDB driver "Erlvolt" that the speaker created over the course of the last three years and that has now become part of the VoltDB distribution. Source examples are presented that show Erlang and VoltDB in action. VoltDB's inner workings are explained to understand why it can be so incredibly fast and still more feature-rich than many of its NoSQL competitors. The recent Erlvolt benchmark clocking in at 877,000 transactions per second is described, and the simple steps to get VoltDB up and running with Erlang, to find out if it can be useful for you. The speaker is creator and maintainer of the Erlang VoltDB driver Erlvolt and a maintainer of the Erlang MySQL driver Emysql.