To enable export at runtime, you include the <export> tag in the deployment file, specifying which export connector to use in with the target attribute. For example:

<export enabled="true" target="file">
   <configuration>
     . . .
   </configuration>
</export>

You must also configure the export connector by specifying properties as one or more <property> tags within the <configuration> tag. For example, the following XML code enables export to comma-separated (CSV) text files using the file prefix "MyExport".

<export enabled="true" target="file">
   <configuration>
     <property name="type">csv</property>
     <property name="nonce">MyExport</property>
  </configuration>
</export>

The properties that are allowed and/or required depend on the export connector you select. VoltDB comes with five export connectors:

As the name implies, the file connector writes the exported data to local files, either as comma-separated or tab-delimited files. Similarly, the JDBC connector writes data to a variety of possible destination databases through the JDBC protocol. The Kafka connector writes export data to an Apache Kafka distributed message queue, where one or more other processes can read the data. In all three cases you configure the specific features of the connector using the <property> tag as described in the following sections.