Does VoltDB fully support ACID on multi-partition (or global) transactions?

Question

My current experience with databases is mainly with MS SQL, MySQL and oracle. I've been looking around at some of the more scalable alternatives (many NoSQL solutions) when I stumbled upon VoltDB.

It looks quite interesting since it maintains the use of SQL, transactions and ACID. The FAQ on their site seems to suggest that even multi-partition (likely across multiple servers) transactions are fully ACID compliant. However it wasn't explicitly stated and I couldn't find any other sources confirming the fact, so I was wondering if anyone could confirm / deny it.

Answer 1

Yes, VoltDB supports cross-partition transactions with full ACID semantics. Typical workloads are usually a mix of mostly single-partition transactions with a smaller fraction of cross-partition transactions.

Answer 2

This is second-hand, so I may have misunderstood something, but I talked to someone who said that VoltDB works by partitioning the data, and holding up the start of any transaction which will update a partition until there are no other transactions running which will access that partition. Once the updating transaction starts, no other transaction can touch the partition until it completes.

This works well for some workloads, and not so well for others.