whichdb

Project Voldemort

discontinued

by LinkedIn · since 2009 · also known as Voldemort

LinkedIn's discontinued open-source Dynamo clone, retired in favour of Venice.

key-valuedatabase engineopen source (permissive)legacy
Website Source★ 2.7K Compare Find similar

discontinued. No longer developed; LinkedIn ended production use in 2018 and migrated to Venice. Last release 1.10.26 (2017).

Overview

Voldemort was LinkedIn's distributed key-value store, one of the first open-source implementations of Amazon's Dynamo paper, with consistent hashing, vector-clock versioning, pluggable storage engines and a well-known read-only mode for bulk-loading Hadoop output. It served LinkedIn features such as 'People You May Know' for years. LinkedIn stopped all production use in 2018 and the README states the project is no longer under development; the read-only use cases moved to Venice. It is of historical interest only.

Transactional apps (OLTP)ML feature store

Strengths & trade-offs

Strengths

  • +Read-only stores could bulk-load precomputed Hadoop output efficiently
  • +Simple Dynamo-style design that was easy to reason about

Trade-offs

  • −Unmaintained since 2017 with no security fixes
  • −Its original owner has migrated away
  • −No modern features such as secondary indexes or TTL

Great for

  • +Understanding Dynamo-style system design
  • +Legacy systems awaiting migration

Think twice for

  • −Any new project

Capabilities

Native or official first-party support · 1 of 25 tracked

✓Durable persistence
–Transactions
–Joins
–Secondary indexes
–Full-text search
–Vector search
–Geospatial
–JSON
–Change data capture
–Triggers
–Stored procedures
–Materialized views
–TTL / expiry
–Pub/Sub
–Columnar storage
–In-memory
–Compression
–Encryption at rest
–Role-based access
–Time travel
–Branching
–Online schema changes
–Streaming ingest
–Offline sync
–Runs in WebAssembly

Scale & consistency

Comfortable data size
Large · ≤ 1 PB
Horizontal scaling
Native
Multi-region
No
Transactions
None
Consistency
Eventual
Schema
Schemaless
Architecture
Distributed, Multi primary, Client server
Query languages
Voldemort client API

Deployment

Self-hosted Vendor-managed cloud Serverless Embedded Edge Kubernetes operator

Ecosystem

apis & protocolsJava client, Protocol Buffers socket protocol
client languagesJava, Python, C++
used byLinkedIn

Alternatives to Project Voldemort

Compare all→
Riak KVKey-Value18.1

Erlang-based, Dynamo-style key-value store built to stay up through ugly failures.

project-voldemort vs riak-kv →
Apache CassandraWide-Column55.9

Masterless wide-column database built for always-on writes across data centers.

project-voldemort vs apache-cassandra →
ScyllaDBWide-Column45.9

C++ rewrite of Cassandra with shard-per-core design; also speaks the DynamoDB API.

project-voldemort vs scylladb →
Amazon DynamoDBKey-Value63.3

AWS's serverless key-value and document store with single-digit-millisecond reads at any scale.

project-voldemort vs amazon-dynamodb →
FoundationDBKey-Value36.8

Apple's ordered, strictly serializable distributed key-value store, built to have layers on top.

project-voldemort vs foundationdb →
TiKVKey-Value20.8

CNCF-graduated, Raft-replicated transactional key-value store in Rust; the storage layer of TiDB.

project-voldemort vs tikv →

Project Voldemort FAQ

What is Project Voldemort?

Project Voldemort is a key-value database by LinkedIn, first released in 2009. Voldemort was LinkedIn's distributed key-value store, one of the first open-source implementations of Amazon's Dynamo paper, with consistent hashing, vector-clock versioning, pluggable storage engines and a well-known read-only mode for bulk-loading Hadoop output. It served LinkedIn features such as 'People You May Know' for years. LinkedIn stopped all production use in 2018 and the README states the project is no longer under development; the read-only use cases moved to Venice. It is of historical interest only.

Is Project Voldemort open source?

Yes. Project Voldemort is open source. License: Apache License 2.0.

Does Project Voldemort support ACID transactions?

No. Project Voldemort does not provide ACID transactions; its consistency model is eventual.

Does Project Voldemort scale horizontally?

Project Voldemort scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at large scale (≤ 1 PB).

How can I run Project Voldemort?

You can self-host it.

What is Project Voldemort best for?

Project Voldemort is a strong fit for understanding Dynamo-style system design and legacy systems awaiting migration. Think twice for any new project.

What are the best alternatives to Project Voldemort?

Common alternatives to Project Voldemort include Riak KV, Apache Cassandra, ScyllaDB, Amazon DynamoDB and FoundationDB. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.

Is Project Voldemort still maintained?

Project Voldemort is discontinued. No longer developed; LinkedIn ended production use in 2018 and migrated to Venice. Last release 1.10.26 (2017).

How popular is Project Voldemort?

Project Voldemort ranks #348 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (7.1/100), and #49 among key-value databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.