[dba-Tech] Baidu does really big data

[Arthur Fuller]

Jim,

I'm not sure precisely how they do it, but VoltDB (the company and product
created by Dr. Michael Stonebraker, who created PostGres) is an in-memory
database designed to use all the memory of all the servers, and treat it as
a single block of RAM. The company also claims that you can add new
server/instances on the fly without bringing the system down, and it will
simply absorb the new hardware. I have no idea what the theoretical
maximums are, but one thing I do know is that their claim to be able to do
50k TPS is real. VoltDB is designed for such massive input loads, such as
those from earthquake sensors or massive multi-pleyer games or worldwide
sales sites such as Amazon or eBay or TicketMaster or handling voting data
in elections.

There's a free community edition available. Also, and I think this is
significant, it uses SQL and specifically, the syntax is almost identical
to that of PostGreSQL (which is way more powerful than T-SQL).

Arthur
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