VoltDB is not intended to solve all database problems. It is targeted at a specific segment of business computing.

VoltDB focuses specifically on fast data. That is, applications that must process large streams of data quickly. This includes financial applications, social media applications, and the burgeoning field of the Internet of Things. The key requirements for these applications are scalability, reliability, high availability, and outstanding throughput.

VoltDB is used today for traditional high performance applications such as capital markets data feeds, financial trade, telco record streams and sensor-based distribution systems. It's also used in emerging applications like wireless, online gaming, fraud detection, digital ad exchanges and micro transaction systems. Any application requiring high database throughput, linear scaling and uncompromising data accuracy will benefit immediately from VoltDB.

However, VoltDB is not optimized for all types of queries. For example, VoltDB is not the optimal choice for collecting and collating extremely large historical data sets which must be queried across multiple tables. This sort of activity is commonly found in business intelligence and data warehousing solutions, for which other database products are better suited.

To aid businesses that require both exceptional transaction performance and ad hoc reporting, VoltDB includes integration functions so that historical data can be exported to an analytic database for larger scale data mining.