H-Store is an experimental database management system

Database management system

A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...

 (DBMS) designed for online transaction processing

Online transaction processing

Online transaction processing, or OLTP, refers to a class of systems that facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, typically for data entry and retrieval transaction processing...

 applications that is being developed by a team at Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, and Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

.
The original design was developed in 2007 by database researchers Michael Stonebraker

Michael Stonebraker

Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database research.Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational database systems on the market today...

, Sam Madden

Samuel Madden (MIT)

Samuel R. Madden is a computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.-Career:...

, and Daniel Abadi.

H-Store is highly optimized for three salient features of OLTP applications:

• Most transactions in an OLTP workload only access a small subset of tuples.
• Most transactions have short execution times and no user stalls
• Most transactions are repeatedly drawn from a pre-defined set of stored procedures

Based on these observations, H-Store was designed as a parallel

Parallel database

A parallel database system seeks to improve performance through parallelization of various operations, such as loading data, building indexes and evaluating queries. Although data may be stored in a distributed fashion, the distribution is governed solely by performance considerations...

, row-storage relational DBMS that runs on a cluster of shared-nothing

Shared nothing architecture

A shared nothing architecture is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is independent and self-sufficient, and there is no single point of contention across the system...

, main memory executor nodes.

H-Store is licensed under the BSD license and GPL licenses. The commercial version of H-Store's design is VoltDB

VoltDB

VoltDB is an in-memory database designed by several well-known database system researchers, including Michael Stonebraker , Sam Madden, and Daniel Abadi. It is an ACID-compliant RDBMS which uses a shared nothing architecture. It includes both enterprise and community editions...

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