Scylla 3.0 announced – Secondary Indexes, Cassandra 3.0 compatibility and more • Hacker News Board

I wad looking into Scylla yesterday so this is really cool timing! Does anyone have any experience with just switching out (Apache) Cassandra with Scylla?

Re: Scylla 3.0 announced – Secondary Indexes, Cassandra 3.0 compatibility and more

#5

Post by walls » Tue, Nov 06, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

sfilargi wrote: post #3

hendzen wrote: post #2

Wow, this team just continues to eat DataStax' lunch.

In which ways?

Datastax has completely dropped the ball with Cassandra. Years of unusable builds because of decisions they couldn't even begin to satisfy or test properly.

Re: Scylla 3.0 announced – Secondary Indexes, Cassandra 3.0 compatibility and more

#6

Post by manigandham » Tue, Nov 06, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

sfilargi wrote: post #3

hendzen wrote: post #2

Wow, this team just continues to eat DataStax' lunch.

In which ways?

Cassandra is a great database design but the implementation has never really matured and become a polished product. The datastax distribution was a nice package but suffered from complexity and poor performance. The political battles also hurt by making even more variations of the database which confused users.

Cassandra is even starting to use some of the architectural ideas from Scylla but it's stuck in a messy state so far. Scylla has the opportunity to cleanup and make forward progress with a solid technical foundation.

Re: Scylla 3.0 announced – Secondary Indexes, Cassandra 3.0 compatibility and more

#7

Post by snapetom » Tue, Nov 06, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

erikrothoff wrote: post #4

I wad looking into Scylla yesterday so this is really cool timing! Does anyone have any experience with just switching out (Apache) Cassandra with Scylla?

I can't directly answer your migration question, but, regarding comparison, our team was looking heavily into Cassandra when someone proposed Scylla. We immediately dove into it and was impressed that their claim of being a drop in for Cassandra, as far as our uses go, is totally true.

We're using it now as we approach Alpha, and love it. Extra bonus - no Zookeeper!

Re: Scylla 3.0 announced – Secondary Indexes, Cassandra 3.0 compatibility and more

#8

Post by manigandham » Tue, Nov 06, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

erikrothoff wrote: post #4

I wad looking into Scylla yesterday so this is really cool timing! Does anyone have any experience with just switching out (Apache) Cassandra with Scylla?

Yes. It's much faster, requires very little maintenance and no tuning. Run repairs every and that's it. It was missing some Cassandra features but looks like 3.0 finally is at parity, according to this press release, so we look forward to upgrading.

EDIT: looks like LWTs are still unavailable https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/issues/1359

Re: Scylla 3.0 announced – Secondary Indexes, Cassandra 3.0 compatibility and more

#9

Post by mcms » Tue, Nov 06, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

snapetom wrote: post #7

erikrothoff wrote: post #4

I wad looking into Scylla yesterday so this is really cool timing! Does anyone have any experience with just switching out (Apache) Cassandra with Scylla?

I can't directly answer your migration question, but, regarding comparison, our team was looking heavily into Cassandra when someone proposed Scylla. We immediately dove into it and was impressed that their claim of being a drop in for Cassandra, as far as our uses go, is totally true. We're using it now as we approach Alpha, and love it. Extra bonus - no Zookeeper!

Just wondering how did you replace Zookeeper with Scylla? AFAIK LWTs are not yet available in Scylla

Re: Scylla 3.0 announced – Secondary Indexes, Cassandra 3.0 compatibility and more

#10

Post by nemothekid » Tue, Nov 06, 2018, 8:13 PM UTC

erikrothoff wrote: post #4

I wad looking into Scylla yesterday so this is really cool timing! Does anyone have any experience with just switching out (Apache) Cassandra with Scylla?

I've managed medium sized Cassandra clusters (~18 nodes) for a couple years (since v1.2). At a new job, last year, I replaced the Cassandra cluster with Scylla. Performance was great, as it says on the in, but as an operator:

- No GC Tuning. It just works out of the box and I don't sleep over requests being dropped because of a multi-second GC.

- Compactions are fast. Compactions in Cassandra generate a lot of garbage (which cause a lot of GC), and end up taking a long time. This becomes worrisome as your largest, most compacted tables tend to be the ones you write a lot too - so performance degrades over time (until you have to shard again).

Cassandra is still very good software though and still a solid choice - it was far more stable than Mongo (pre-WiredTiger, I haven't used mongo past ~2.2), and while the above issues were annoying, they were entirely predictable. Capacity planning was easy, and with Scylla you may find yourself running fewer nodes (maybe DSE prefers Java because they charge per core, jk).

The only thing I've missed in Scylla so far is LWTs, but I have not used that much.