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Round trips over the network of any kind are actually the fastest way to make your application slow. So if you do optimize for performance then this is a good starting point, if you do go over the network a lot. But you are right that you should think twice and first make sure you even built the right thing.

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Yes, I agree.

But, in many (if not most) situations the ms you loose by doing more round trips then necessary are not worth how much more maintainable the system is.

Especially when there is probably some programming or query optimization that will save you seconds, when reducing the round trips is a matter of ms.

It's very system dependent, but VoltDB is designed for systems that require up to a million tps. "A matter of ms" is not irrelevant in such systems.

Yes, ok I agree. 100% agree.

But micro optimization has always the same caveat:

Of course it is not irrelevant, it might even be very important, in very specific cases.

But if you are not one of those cases (and you should already know if you are) you shouldn't even bother with it.

I think that everything you just said categorizes VoltDB already, though. They're not advertising themselves as a general purpose database. You'll know if you have a use case for it.

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