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Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

scylladb.com

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Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#41

Post by haswell »

jiggawatts wrote: post #35

(Just in case some Scylla employees see this YC News post) Sigh... I know this sounds like a nitpick, and I know it sounds like a broken record, and I know you probably work in a different team and there's "nothing" you can do about it... But. I went to your website, interested in your product. I'm your target market! This site needs to impress me , and people like me . What's the first thing that I see? The website…

These are classic enterprise software lead gen tactics and somewhat hint at the future you might expect should you do business with them.

Hopefully this was a poorly thought out gate and not a signal that they’ve gone full enterprise tactics.

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#42

Post by void_mint »

ethelward wrote: post #16
masterof0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read my mind. LOL. "Mr. Developer, can you please write your project in Rust, or __insert_your_meme_language_here__, or Javascript?"

Fromthe mouth of CockraochDB's CTO: ‶So if we were starting at this point in time, I would take a hard look at Rust, and I imagine that we would pick it instead of C++.″

Right, meaning, no, the CTO would not be "surprised" that C++ was a candidate for a high performance system. C++ is the defacto, and Rust would be a "new" option.

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#43

Post by biggestdummy »

Notanothertoo wrote: post #39

Been using it since 2017 for IoT time series data. Works great, very fast. I think the one criticism is that it seems the company has some intentional rough edges on it, in favor of their SaaS over the open source release. It used to be around backing up and managing updates long term ect. They have gotten better but their helm chart for example is very opinionated and uses custom resources in place of say a stateful…

So an open exchange of ideas, and some free assistance. Sounds like it was a good outcome for you. :)

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#44

Post by staticassertion »

jstrong wrote: post #33
RussianCow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consequently, to use Rust in a way that produces equivalent performance requires marking most of the address space as "unsafe". And while you could do this, Rust is currently less expressive than modern C++ for this type of code anyway, so it isn't ergonomic either. Based on my (admittedly limited) experience with Rust, this isn't true. Yes, you'd likely have to use "unsafe" a few times in order to implement a data…

I am a very avid proponent of rust. however, here are a few places I have had difficulty in working on custom storage engines in rust: - uninitialized memory: it is tricky to get the semantics of uninitialized memory right. the ergonomics of the `MaybeUninit` api are frankly terrible. - memory alignment: for O_DIRECT and other cases where memory alignment is important, it is difficult to ensure that the backing memor…

> - uninitialized memory: it is tricky to get the semantics of uninitialized memory right. the ergonomics of the `MaybeUninit` api are frankly terrible.

Agreed. There's some unstable APIs that will help, but it's not great today.

> mmap

There is no possible way to expose raw mmap safely because the data under the hood can change out from under you. Whatever it is you're doing you'd want to wrap that. For example, a &[u8] could be safe, but not if you then did `str::from_utf8`. So you just have to make sure that mmap'd data is treated very carefully and doesn't get exposed across a safe boundary.

> - hostility to unsafe:

Same feeling here and I know many others feel the same way. The community can overreact to things, it is what it is.

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#45

Post by throwaway81523 »

zinclozenge wrote: post #4
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

I posted this because I'm interested to hear from anyone using it - how has it worked out for you? I note it's written in C++ which is a bit of a surprise - I'd expected Rust or Golang. Interesting as well is is AGPL - licensing is always contentious: https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/blob/master/LICENSE.AGPL

I think the main reason it's in C++ is because of its async executor, Seastar. There's a similar Rust project called Glommio but seems still very early.

Seastar is sort of a C++-ification of node.js. Now that C++20 has coroutines, I wonder if those could have been used instead of all that chained method stuff.

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#46

Post by enedil »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #45
zinclozenge wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main reason it's in C++ is because of its async executor, Seastar. There's a similar Rust project called Glommio but seems still very early.

Seastar is sort of a C++-ification of node.js. Now that C++20 has coroutines, I wonder if those could have been used instead of all that chained method stuff.

Seastar already uses coroutines, however coroutines without Seastar reactor (and all the utilities for IO) are useless by themselves. You still need a way to schedule what's being done when.

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#47

Post by ethelward »

fbernier wrote: post #40
ethelward wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fromthe mouth of CockraochDB's CTO: ‶So if we were starting at this point in time, I would take a hard look at Rust, and I imagine that we would pick it instead of C++.″

Wasn't that from the ScyllaDB CTO ?

Indeed, you're right.

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#48

Post by jiggawatts »

PeterCorless wrote: post #37
jiggawatts wrote: post #35

(Just in case some Scylla employees see this YC News post) Sigh... I know this sounds like a nitpick, and I know it sounds like a broken record, and I know you probably work in a different team and there's "nothing" you can do about it... But. I went to your website, interested in your product. I'm your target market! This site needs to impress me , and people like me . What's the first thing that I see? The website…

Peter Corless here from ScyllaDB's marketing team. Your feedback is 100% heard, understood & appreciated. I'll share it with the team. The good news is that we just provided a new benchmark today and it is 100% ungated. Scylla 4.4 vs Cassandra 4.0: https://www.scylladb.com/2021/08/24/apache-cassandra-4-0-vs-... Also, here are a few other free and open blogs where we have benchmarked vs. competitors: Scylla vs. Dynamo…

To also provide some constructive feedback:

A good point of comparison is this website: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

It's also a product targetted at technical people, including people working at startups and also large enterprise.

No popups.

When you click the community edition download link -- bam -- it is immediately downloading! No form to fill in.

I don't even use their tools much any more, except for the Rust plugin. Nonetheless, I read through their "what's new" release notes, even for Java, because it is so well presented: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/

I don't have to sit through an hour-long YouTube video watching some guy introducing some other guy I don't care about for five minutes. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant

Instead they have GIFs showing short, to-the-point snippets of exactly what each feature does. Note that these don't animate by default! You have to click them to play the clip. I love that. They're helpful without being distracting while I'm reading nearby text.

It also gives you an idea of what the product looks like in actual use.

You have no idea how much crap people wade through to find this! I often spend hours googling terms like "Product X Screenshot", "Product X real-world", "Product X tutorial" in the futile attempt to just find out what the heck to expect. Is it a green-screen terminal app kept alive like some sort of crime against nature? Is it a web application? Does it come with a Windows-only GUI? If so, is it at least a usable one? Does it have command-line tools? PowerShell? Tab-complete?

You go to a site like JetBrains, and you see exactly that! Real-world code being manipulated, showing you the product in all its glory.

So show this! Show ScyllaDB doing something. Don't just talk about how it's 47% more snazzy than a competing product I haven't used.

Show it doing a schema change nearly instantly on a terabyte of data, or whatever. But show me the product, or I walk away until I find a website that isn't afraid of letting me see what they're selling...

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#49

Post by PeterCorless »

jiggawatts wrote: post #48
PeterCorless wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Corless here from ScyllaDB's marketing team. Your feedback is 100% heard, understood & appreciated. I'll share it with the team. The good news is that we just provided a new benchmark today and it is 100% ungated. Scylla 4.4 vs Cassandra 4.0: https://www.scylladb.com/2021/08/24/apache-cassandra-4-0-vs-... Also, here are a few other free and open blogs where we have benchmarked vs. competitors: Scylla vs. Dynamo…

To also provide some constructive feedback: A good point of comparison is this website: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ It's also a product targetted at technical people, including people working at startups and also large enterprise. No popups. When you click the community edition download link -- bam -- it is immediately downloading! No form to fill in. I don't even use their tools much any more, except for the Rus…

Good point on the video-first strategy. We're talking more about this internally.

Also: For Scylla Open Source downloads aren't gated -- no name or email address neeeded. We do need to ask what platform you're running on, because the way you deploy to each is different. e.g.,

https://www.scylladb.com/download/?platform=aws#open-source

Re: Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database

#50

Post by rakshazi »

jiggawatts wrote: post #35

(Just in case some Scylla employees see this YC News post) Sigh... I know this sounds like a nitpick, and I know it sounds like a broken record, and I know you probably work in a different team and there's "nothing" you can do about it... But. I went to your website, interested in your product. I'm your target market! This site needs to impress me , and people like me . What's the first thing that I see? The website…

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