The pie chart is based on this paper: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/oltpperf-sigmod08.pdf http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/oltpperf-sigmo

The pie chart is based on this paper: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/oltpperf-sigmod08.pdf http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/oltpperf-sigmod08.... The pie chart numbers have been updated to reflect the right charts in the paper, but the graphic hasn't. We'll try to get that fixed for future presentations. The point is very real. Stavros, Dan, Sam and Mike took the Shore RDBMS and stuck it on top of memory. Then they removed parts of it and measured the performance difference. Logging, buffer management, and concurrency management make up about 93% of the instructions run and 88% of the cycles for TPC-C "new order". There was no single area that dominated this overhead, so removing one piece doesn't make enough of a difference. Results on Oracle, SQL Severer and DB2 might be different, but it's hard to imagine they'd be dramatically different. Because VoltDB was built without these sources of overhead, it's usually quite a bit faster than systems that take legacy RDBMSs and back them with memory. VoltDB has limitations (especially in 1.0), but if your workload fits, it will go as fast as you need it to.