I like ScyllaDb. But I am not sure, why does it need to run on XFS only ?
The entire database is designed for performance with message-passing thread-per-core async architecture. XFS is the only filesystem that has good async support.
ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#22If I was Datastax I would be scared of Scylla. They have momentum and they are one of the best engineering teams around outside of top teams at Google/FB etc.
I wouldn't. Enterprise companies care about performance, sure. But far, far less than they care about being on a supported platform. DataStax has done the hard yards over the years to prove themselves capable of supporting Cassandra. SycllaDB has no street cred at all. So SycllaDB might make some inroads in performance critical startups and web companies. But that is likely to be about it.
Aren't you being too dismissive? All database companies have to start from somewhere, Datastax was brand new once too.
This funding is part of the story to make sure Scylla can support customers but they have a much better foundation to build upon with this database tech.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#23Congratulations to the team! I would love to move over from Apache Cassandra to Scylla but honestly I'm a bit afraid to do that. I have no doubt that it's much faster but I haven't seen hard numbers about consistency and availability. Apache Cassandra is a much older project with many installations and is battle tested (to a degree) how can I be sure that Scylla will behave as stable as Cassandra in that regard?
We use v1.5 in production and it's been very stable. Team is responsive on issues (github and mailing list).
They dont have 100% parity yet with all cassandra features so waiting for that to move more work over to scylla, but performance per machine and lack of tuning hassle is very nice.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#24Does anyone else find it a bit weird that a post on ScyllaDB's blog announcing their fundraising starts with: "ScyllaDB announced today that it?" It seems weirdly self referential to me. They're definitely not the only ones to do this though. Anyways, congrats on the funding guys, certainly not trying to cast shade.
This is the standard format for a press release (note the URL of the article - scylladb.com/press-release/...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_release
I guess that makes some sense. It's still pretty weird to me though, the big difference with a press release is that the press is writing about an announcement that the company made. So it makes sense to describe the company in third person. If the company is writing for themselves they should just announce that they want to announce rather than announce their announcement.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#25Does anyone else find it a bit weird that a post on ScyllaDB's blog announcing their fundraising starts with: "ScyllaDB announced today that it?" It seems weirdly self referential to me. They're definitely not the only ones to do this though. Anyways, congrats on the funding guys, certainly not trying to cast shade.
Illeism is a device often used in PR/IR to inject a dose of impartiality in an otherwise biased content.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#26I don't get it. Is this just a faster Cassandra? What's their competitive niche?
Their marketing points are really understood and relatable to people who know what a pain operating Cassandra can be. The two biggest pain points IMO are read-repair and compaction - both of which must be run periodically and consume a huge amount of resources. Read Repair is especially a pain because (1) it must be run periodically or you risk losing data (2) it takes forever to complete in some deploys (ex - you must run read-repair in a certain (user-tunable) timeframe, the default of which is every 10 days - I have tables that take 7 days to complete a read-repair, meaning I have repairs pretty much running 24/7) and (3) there are no/few operational tools to manage read repair. The low-tech way is to write a cron job on every node - and even then there is no way to measure progress or detect if a job failed/completed without grepping logs - it's so bad that Spotify wrote a open source tool to manage it.
The solution has been to just buy more nodes (if you don't want long repairs, store less than 1TB of data per node) and faster disks. Read Repair maintenance is probably the only thing I hate about Cassandra - and seeing benchmarks that Scylla does these operations on the order of minutes rather than hours is attractive enough for most people (I don't think most deploys are even coming close to the benchmarked txn/s in real-world workloads, for both databases). Both compaction and repair tend to be CPU intensive (both work by essentially reading a ton of data), so I'd imagine the move to C++ and the core-per-thread design is more efficient.
In short, the operational efficiency is far more attractive even if you aren't pushing a trillion writes/sec.
I've been thinking about testing Scylla for a while, but unfortunately they don't support the features we support, and while our Cassandra deployment is a rather comparatively large cost, there are enough things on my plate right now where trading my current set of evils for other unknown ones isn't very attractive.
See this post by Discord App - https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m... - where they are mentioning moving to Scylla from Cassandra for similar reasons. Performance is fine, but repair efficiency is more of the driving factor.
I'd also add that Cassandra advertises itself as a relatively high performance database for distributed workloads. If something like a faster Cassandra doesn't entice you, chances are you'd be better served by something like Postgres anyways.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
A faster, well engineered, drop in replacement for Cassandra is a pretty competitive niche in of itself, don't you think?
I guess but I don't really know. Lots of people have Cassandra in production. I suppose there is a certain segment of that market that needs a super high performance version, but is it really that big?
Cassandra is supposed to be a high-performance database, except it has some fundamental issues that keep it from being what it can be. ScyllaDB fixes those fundamental issues so anyone using cassandra can benefit from using scylla instead.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#28Is there any change to the data model? Guessing still no secondary indexes for example.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the standard format for a press release (note the URL of the article - scylladb.com/press-release/...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_release
I guess that makes some sense. It's still pretty weird to me though, the big difference with a press release is that the press is writing about an announcement that the company made. So it makes sense to describe the company in third person. If the company is writing for themselves they should just announce that they want to announce rather than announce their announcement.
A press release is written by the company, then released for the press to further distribute and write about if necessary.
Re: ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding
#30Is there any change to the data model? Guessing still no secondary indexes for example.
They're working on getting to feature parity with cassandra by version 2.0