7 ms·

ScyllaDB Closes $16M in Series B Funding

76 points by bsg75 10y ago

hendzen 10y ago
If 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.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Maybe I'm too far out of the loop but while they both provide enterprise Cassandra they both also offer a bunch of different products so in some product categories there may be plenty of room for both of them. I gotta say though, going to each of their websites, and Scylla was very straight forward "here's what we provide" and I understand it pretty quickly. Datastax? I...still don't entirely understand what they offer. It's all loaded with enterprise buzz words.
  - digitalzombie 10y ago
    Yeah they're pretty buzzword ish. But last I heard they bought in the titandb guy to build their own enterprise graph database on top of cassandra. So they got that going for them.
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      Oh I forgot about that! That's a big thing going for them. I feel like half the projects I've worked on in the recent past could benefit from a graph database.
- threeseed 10y ago
  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.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    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.
  - hendzen 10y ago
    Enterprise companies also care about OPEX.. i.e. if they have an internal SLA that can be met with a 100 node C* cluster or with 10 Scylla nodes, that will matter quite a bit.
    - threeseed 10y ago
      Enterprise companies spend millions on database projects and majority of the cost comes from Professional Services and Consultancies engaged in data migration etc. So cost of the product itself is never the driving factor especially when the cost will be so substantially less already than Teradata or Oracle. And the most important part of a database is confidence. You need to be able to trust that when you have a Production outage IT is able to talk to someone to fix it. DataStax has proven capable of meeting that task. It's very difficult for a second tier player to do the same especially with Cassandra being such a niche product.
      - true_religion 10y ago
        Doing more with the same budget is a big thing within any department. It's a way to show 'efficiency' thus garner points for promotion. Overall company budget for a technology group is besides the point---individual departments are budget constrained and being able to say I saved 30% last quarter, and whilst handing 200% more operations is something any manager would love.
      - hendzen 10y ago
        I used to work for a database company and have been involved in the purchasing side of database support contracts. Professional Services/Consulting is a small revenue line (and TCO component) relative to support licensing. It also has considerably lower margins. Scylla is an upstart... but I would not call them a second tier player. DataStax is already trying and failing [0, 1] to incorporate ideas from Scylla in to their product. Yes, support and SLAs matter. And this round of funding will go a long way toward helping Scylla build out those parts of their business. [0] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10989 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10989 [1] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8520 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8520
jdoliner 10y ago
Does 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.
- gshulegaard 10y ago
  I have noticed this trend as well. If I had to guess it's a SEO thing.
- hendzen 10y ago
  The founding team is Israeli I believe, and their team is distributed across the world, so this may not have been written by a native English speaker.
  - dvirsky 10y ago
    It was probably written by their PR firm.
- gondo 10y ago
  i assume that it is a public release meant to be easily copied as is by anyone (preferably as many as possible) without a hassle of rewriting it
- tekacs 10y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_release
  - jdoliner 10y ago
    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.
TheGuyWhoCodes 10y ago
Congratulations 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?
- bkeroack 10y ago
  We don't use it for any production services, but for internal use it's been pretty darn solid. Really fast too, we benchmarked 80k/sec/node inserts on EC2.
- manigandham 10y ago
  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.
- tirus 10y ago
  We use 1.6 in production on AWS i3.16xlarges and it's great. We've seen a reduction to less than half the nodes and over 100k per node requests/sec (up from 4k req/sec for Cassandra). Very few issues and those that come up get immediate attention from core developers that actually wrote the code you're having issues with. Absolutely 100% recommend.
dominotw 10y ago
Garbage collection has been the pain point for java based tech like hadoop. Interesting to see databases being written in Golang, which I imagine would have the same issues.
- Chyzwar 10y ago
  ScyllaDB is written in C++.
rosslazer 10y ago
I don't get it. Is this just a faster Cassandra? What's their competitive niche?
- nopzor 10y ago
  A faster, well engineered, drop in replacement for Cassandra is a pretty competitive niche in of itself, don't you think?
  - rosslazer 10y ago
    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?
    - manigandham 10y ago
      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.
    - penberg 10y ago
      For many users, that "super high performance" really just means lower request processing latency, which is a very desirable feature to have in various market segments. Look at the various benchmarks available (or run the benchmarks yourself) and you will see that Scylla has a very consistent, low latency that's a direct result of its non-blocking, shared-nothing architecture and implementation in a non-manage language, which gives us more control.
- bkeroack 10y ago
  An order of magnitude faster Cassandra with no GC pauses (because it's C++). It's a literal drop in replacement. Even nodetool is compatible.
- nemothekid 10y ago
ram_rar 10y ago
I like ScyllaDb. But I am not sure, why does it need to run on XFS only ?
- manigandham 10y ago
  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. http://www.scylladb.com/2016/02/09/qualifying-filesystems/ http://www.scylladb.com/2016/02/09/qualifying-filesystems/ http://www.scylladb.com/technology/architecture/ http://www.scylladb.com/technology/architecture/
  - penberg 10y ago
    Yes, exactly. Scylla needs proper AIO/DIO support at the filesystem level and XFS has so far been the one that implements it best. There are fixes to Scylla to make it also run well on ext4 (by working around some of its limitations), but that's not part of any release yet.
ram_rar 10y ago
I like ScyllaDb. But I am not sure, why does it need to run on XFS only ?
redwood 10y ago
Is there any change to the data model? Guessing still no secondary indexes for example.
- manigandham 10y ago
  They're working on getting to feature parity with cassandra by version 2.0 http://www.scylladb.com/technology/status/ http://www.scylladb.com/technology/status/
  - jazoom 10y ago
    Unfortunately that doesn't seem to give any indication of how long that might be. I just saw a post from one of their engineers about a year ago that said secondary indices would only take about 2 weeks to implement.
    - penberg 10y ago
      Where did you see that kind of estimate? We are currently working on first finishing materialized view support, which will hopefully be completed in the upcoming months. Secondary indices will be implemented after that and we're hoping to reuse MV infrastructure for that. So I personally expect both features to land into a release later this year.
      - jazoom 10y ago
        Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11523531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11523531
        penberg 10y ago
        Thanks for the pointer! Please note that @glommer is talking about the classic secondary index implementation in Cassandra, which is very simple but also broken. I don't know the details but we probably did have "half-ready" code for that. We decided against going forward with it because Cassandra had already moved to SASI (which is also much more complex). As I said, we're currently focusing on materialized views, and tacking secondary indices after that. Btw, I highly recommend subscribing to our user mailing list or engaging on Github for questions and comments about features. You'll get better and up-to-date answers there. Update: reading @glommer's reply carefully, he explicitly says that he's unsure if we'll move forward with that specific implementation: "_if_ we do implement it, it should land in our main version in a couple of weeks" (emphasis mine).
mwcampbell 10y ago
Looks like this is the same team that brought us OSv (http://osv.io/ http://osv.io/). So is OSv abandoned now?
- jensfr 10y ago
  OSv and ... KVM
- thekozmo 10y ago
  It's not abandoned, we continue to maintain and contribute to it but sadly, it's not our business focus in the present. I really want to see it to win centerstage one day in the future. Few orgs do use it in production. It's really cool but along with it the cloud needs to change. For instance, we wanted to have a 1-minute-granularity price scheme from the cloud vendors so it will resemble a container (just with hardware-based security..). This any many needs to happen for it.
notacoward 10y ago
Business plan. 1. Let someone else solve the hard distributed-system problems. 2. Re-implement the local pieces for higher performance. 3. Profit!
- geodel 10y ago
  No one stopped that someone to work for higher performance and profit themselves.
  - notacoward 10y ago
    Nobody stopped them; they were just busy doing other things that made the effort worthwhile. It's worth keeping that in mind, to make sure that competitive claims about performance don't drown out proper credit for the true innovators. Note that I'm not saying anything is wrong here. Reimplementations of existing ideas are a time honored tradition, and often lead to their own innovations. Linux was a reimplementation of UNIX, and seems to have been good for a lot of people. Most web servers and browsers are reimplementations of things that had existed previously. From compilers and databases to filesystems and hypervisors, a lot of software we all rely on today - especially in open source - is a reimplementation of something or other. I'm pointing out an opportunity, not a flaw.
crudbug 10y ago
Congratulations to the team. Any word on native JSON types ? Scylla will have another reason to drop Cassandra.
- penberg 10y ago
  JSON types are actually not very often requested feature so we have not prioritized it very high. I suspect that's because most people just store their JSON data as text and do processing in their applocation. There's an open issue about it on Github: https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/issues/2058 https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/issues/2058 Please feel free to upvote and comment on the issue to voice your interest in the feature.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    Some clarity - that issue is about interfacing with a row within a CQL table as a piece of json, not actually storing a schemaless json document (like in a special postgres-style json datatype). Cassandra is actually schemaless but since the shift to CQL from Thrift, it's unlikely that it'll go back to a schemaless model again. In the meantime, the Keen.IO crew has a nice model for storing lots of arbitrary json if that's something thats needed. It takes some work but a very clever strategy and they've made it work well.
agentgt 10y ago
You know if Postgres can just get some better distributed/elastic support it could do some damage. I switched from Cassandra to citus + pipelinedb (and I'm JVM guy). Postgres is such an awesome platform. I'm planning on looking into some logical decoding.
- manigandham 10y ago
  Postgres is a completely different type of database, there's not much comparison with cassandra/scylla at all. It also has a way to go with just scale-up performance before it even gets to scale-out.
  - agentgt 10y ago
    I wanted a db for realtime analytics. I agree on scale-out but scale-up performance I will say Cassandra is not even close to cost to performance ratio of Postgres w/ extensions for a real time analytics. I have legitimate 6months experience that I wasted on Driud/Cassandra and could not match Postgres in terms of performance. I don't want to hear CAP this and that when I can do all sorts of stream processing a priori. Besides real SQL is easy to understand and hack with then many proprietary query languages. I only tell people so they don't was time like I did.
    - manigandham 10y ago
      > realtime analytics This doesn't mean anything. The only thing that matters is what (and how much) data you have and what queries you want to run. If a relational database can do that for you then cassandra/scylla isn't a good choice.
      - agentgt 10y ago
        > This doesn't mean anything. And neither does your practically trolling comment. You could say that about anything. > The only thing that matters is what (and how much) data you have and what queries you want to run. If a relational database can do that for you then cassandra/scylla isn't a good choice. Theory aside what matters is what I can get to work... so prior knowledge is a big deal. All I said is it would be interesting if Postgres had a better story for elasticity and that it might be a good fit for many. I think many are in my camp and a relational db would fit but are all to often pushed towards to NoSQL. Again I don't want to hear about CAP this and that. You can totally take either system and make it have many of the properties that our touted for each one. People take relational databases and turn them into schemaless or columnar stores all the time with eventually consistency (often with mysql). Particularly with Postgres as it is a platform (it has a powerful extension model). Regardless Cassandra is touted for analytics. The marketing really pushes it for that. Eventually consistency and columnar store is a good fit for real time analytics. Lots of data points, lots of aggregation, get to play with various queries in realtime, elasticity... etc. We will probably hit a wall with Postgres. All and all I think Cassandra is pretty good for what it does. Other than Redis, and maybe RethinkDB I think its my third NoSQL favorite (and yes I know each of those guys has a sweet spot for what they are good at requirement wise).
mrits 10y ago
From their front page: "allow for perfect scale-up linear performance of up to 1,000,000 read/write operations per node." What happens after 1M operations? The nodes catch on fire?
- jazoom 10y ago
  I know nothing about database architecture but I'm gonna assume that the individual operations take longer until you distribute the load across more nodes.
  - glommer 10y ago
    Every system has a maximum capacity, and after that is reached, the requests just see increased latency without increased throughput. At this point you scale up (by replacing it with better hardware) or out (by adding more nodes).

76 points by bsg75 10y ago

If 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.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Maybe I'm too far out of the loop but while they both provide enterprise Cassandra they both also offer a bunch of different products so in some product categories there may be plenty of room for both of them. I gotta say though, going to each of their websites, and Scylla was very straight forward "here's what we provide" and I understand it pretty quickly. Datastax? I...still don't entirely understand what they offer. It's all loaded with enterprise buzz words.
- digitalzombie 10y ago
  Yeah they're pretty buzzword ish. But last I heard they bought in the titandb guy to build their own enterprise graph database on top of cassandra. So they got that going for them.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    Oh I forgot about that! That's a big thing going for them. I feel like half the projects I've worked on in the recent past could benefit from a graph database.
threeseed 10y ago
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.
- manigandham 10y ago
  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.
- hendzen 10y ago
  Enterprise companies also care about OPEX.. i.e. if they have an internal SLA that can be met with a 100 node C* cluster or with 10 Scylla nodes, that will matter quite a bit.
  - threeseed 10y ago
    Enterprise companies spend millions on database projects and majority of the cost comes from Professional Services and Consultancies engaged in data migration etc. So cost of the product itself is never the driving factor especially when the cost will be so substantially less already than Teradata or Oracle. And the most important part of a database is confidence. You need to be able to trust that when you have a Production outage IT is able to talk to someone to fix it. DataStax has proven capable of meeting that task. It's very difficult for a second tier player to do the same especially with Cassandra being such a niche product.
    - true_religion 10y ago
      Doing more with the same budget is a big thing within any department. It's a way to show 'efficiency' thus garner points for promotion. Overall company budget for a technology group is besides the point---individual departments are budget constrained and being able to say I saved 30% last quarter, and whilst handing 200% more operations is something any manager would love.
    - hendzen 10y ago
      I used to work for a database company and have been involved in the purchasing side of database support contracts. Professional Services/Consulting is a small revenue line (and TCO component) relative to support licensing. It also has considerably lower margins. Scylla is an upstart... but I would not call them a second tier player. DataStax is already trying and failing [0, 1] to incorporate ideas from Scylla in to their product. Yes, support and SLAs matter. And this round of funding will go a long way toward helping Scylla build out those parts of their business. [0] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10989 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10989 [1] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8520 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8520

jdoliner 10y ago

Does 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.

gshulegaard 10y ago
I have noticed this trend as well. If I had to guess it's a SEO thing.
hendzen 10y ago
The founding team is Israeli I believe, and their team is distributed across the world, so this may not have been written by a native English speaker.
- dvirsky 10y ago
  It was probably written by their PR firm.
gondo 10y ago
i assume that it is a public release meant to be easily copied as is by anyone (preferably as many as possible) without a hassle of rewriting it
tekacs 10y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_release
- jdoliner 10y ago
  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.

TheGuyWhoCodes 10y ago

Congratulations 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?

bkeroack 10y ago
We don't use it for any production services, but for internal use it's been pretty darn solid. Really fast too, we benchmarked 80k/sec/node inserts on EC2.
manigandham 10y ago
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.
tirus 10y ago
We use 1.6 in production on AWS i3.16xlarges and it's great. We've seen a reduction to less than half the nodes and over 100k per node requests/sec (up from 4k req/sec for Cassandra). Very few issues and those that come up get immediate attention from core developers that actually wrote the code you're having issues with. Absolutely 100% recommend.

dominotw 10y ago

Garbage collection has been the pain point for java based tech like hadoop. Interesting to see databases being written in Golang, which I imagine would have the same issues.

Chyzwar 10y ago
ScyllaDB is written in C++.

rosslazer 10y ago

I don't get it. Is this just a faster Cassandra? What's their competitive niche?

nopzor 10y ago
A faster, well engineered, drop in replacement for Cassandra is a pretty competitive niche in of itself, don't you think?
- rosslazer 10y ago
  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?
  - manigandham 10y ago
    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.
  - penberg 10y ago
    For many users, that "super high performance" really just means lower request processing latency, which is a very desirable feature to have in various market segments. Look at the various benchmarks available (or run the benchmarks yourself) and you will see that Scylla has a very consistent, low latency that's a direct result of its non-blocking, shared-nothing architecture and implementation in a non-manage language, which gives us more control.
bkeroack 10y ago
An order of magnitude faster Cassandra with no GC pauses (because it's C++). It's a literal drop in replacement. Even nodetool is compatible.
nemothekid 10y ago

ram_rar 10y ago

I like ScyllaDb. But I am not sure, why does it need to run on XFS only ?

manigandham 10y ago
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. http://www.scylladb.com/2016/02/09/qualifying-filesystems/ http://www.scylladb.com/2016/02/09/qualifying-filesystems/ http://www.scylladb.com/technology/architecture/ http://www.scylladb.com/technology/architecture/
- penberg 10y ago
  Yes, exactly. Scylla needs proper AIO/DIO support at the filesystem level and XFS has so far been the one that implements it best. There are fixes to Scylla to make it also run well on ext4 (by working around some of its limitations), but that's not part of any release yet.

ram_rar 10y ago

I like ScyllaDb. But I am not sure, why does it need to run on XFS only ?

redwood 10y ago

Is there any change to the data model? Guessing still no secondary indexes for example.

manigandham 10y ago
They're working on getting to feature parity with cassandra by version 2.0 http://www.scylladb.com/technology/status/ http://www.scylladb.com/technology/status/
- jazoom 10y ago
  Unfortunately that doesn't seem to give any indication of how long that might be. I just saw a post from one of their engineers about a year ago that said secondary indices would only take about 2 weeks to implement.
  - penberg 10y ago
    Where did you see that kind of estimate? We are currently working on first finishing materialized view support, which will hopefully be completed in the upcoming months. Secondary indices will be implemented after that and we're hoping to reuse MV infrastructure for that. So I personally expect both features to land into a release later this year.
    - jazoom 10y ago
      Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11523531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11523531
      - penberg 10y ago
        Thanks for the pointer! Please note that @glommer is talking about the classic secondary index implementation in Cassandra, which is very simple but also broken. I don't know the details but we probably did have "half-ready" code for that. We decided against going forward with it because Cassandra had already moved to SASI (which is also much more complex). As I said, we're currently focusing on materialized views, and tacking secondary indices after that. Btw, I highly recommend subscribing to our user mailing list or engaging on Github for questions and comments about features. You'll get better and up-to-date answers there. Update: reading @glommer's reply carefully, he explicitly says that he's unsure if we'll move forward with that specific implementation: "_if_ we do implement it, it should land in our main version in a couple of weeks" (emphasis mine).

mwcampbell 10y ago

Looks like this is the same team that brought us OSv (http://osv.io/ http://osv.io/). So is OSv abandoned now?

jensfr 10y ago
OSv and ... KVM
thekozmo 10y ago
It's not abandoned, we continue to maintain and contribute to it but sadly, it's not our business focus in the present. I really want to see it to win centerstage one day in the future. Few orgs do use it in production. It's really cool but along with it the cloud needs to change. For instance, we wanted to have a 1-minute-granularity price scheme from the cloud vendors so it will resemble a container (just with hardware-based security..). This any many needs to happen for it.

notacoward 10y ago

Business plan. 1. Let someone else solve the hard distributed-system problems. 2. Re-implement the local pieces for higher performance. 3. Profit!

geodel 10y ago
No one stopped that someone to work for higher performance and profit themselves.
- notacoward 10y ago
  Nobody stopped them; they were just busy doing other things that made the effort worthwhile. It's worth keeping that in mind, to make sure that competitive claims about performance don't drown out proper credit for the true innovators. Note that I'm not saying anything is wrong here. Reimplementations of existing ideas are a time honored tradition, and often lead to their own innovations. Linux was a reimplementation of UNIX, and seems to have been good for a lot of people. Most web servers and browsers are reimplementations of things that had existed previously. From compilers and databases to filesystems and hypervisors, a lot of software we all rely on today - especially in open source - is a reimplementation of something or other. I'm pointing out an opportunity, not a flaw.

crudbug 10y ago

Congratulations to the team. Any word on native JSON types ? Scylla will have another reason to drop Cassandra.

penberg 10y ago
JSON types are actually not very often requested feature so we have not prioritized it very high. I suspect that's because most people just store their JSON data as text and do processing in their applocation. There's an open issue about it on Github: https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/issues/2058 https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/issues/2058 Please feel free to upvote and comment on the issue to voice your interest in the feature.
- manigandham 10y ago
  Some clarity - that issue is about interfacing with a row within a CQL table as a piece of json, not actually storing a schemaless json document (like in a special postgres-style json datatype). Cassandra is actually schemaless but since the shift to CQL from Thrift, it's unlikely that it'll go back to a schemaless model again. In the meantime, the Keen.IO crew has a nice model for storing lots of arbitrary json if that's something thats needed. It takes some work but a very clever strategy and they've made it work well.

agentgt 10y ago

You know if Postgres can just get some better distributed/elastic support it could do some damage. I switched from Cassandra to citus + pipelinedb (and I'm JVM guy). Postgres is such an awesome platform. I'm planning on looking into some logical decoding.

manigandham 10y ago
Postgres is a completely different type of database, there's not much comparison with cassandra/scylla at all. It also has a way to go with just scale-up performance before it even gets to scale-out.
- agentgt 10y ago
  I wanted a db for realtime analytics. I agree on scale-out but scale-up performance I will say Cassandra is not even close to cost to performance ratio of Postgres w/ extensions for a real time analytics. I have legitimate 6months experience that I wasted on Driud/Cassandra and could not match Postgres in terms of performance. I don't want to hear CAP this and that when I can do all sorts of stream processing a priori. Besides real SQL is easy to understand and hack with then many proprietary query languages. I only tell people so they don't was time like I did.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    > realtime analytics This doesn't mean anything. The only thing that matters is what (and how much) data you have and what queries you want to run. If a relational database can do that for you then cassandra/scylla isn't a good choice.
    - agentgt 10y ago
      > This doesn't mean anything. And neither does your practically trolling comment. You could say that about anything. > The only thing that matters is what (and how much) data you have and what queries you want to run. If a relational database can do that for you then cassandra/scylla isn't a good choice. Theory aside what matters is what I can get to work... so prior knowledge is a big deal. All I said is it would be interesting if Postgres had a better story for elasticity and that it might be a good fit for many. I think many are in my camp and a relational db would fit but are all to often pushed towards to NoSQL. Again I don't want to hear about CAP this and that. You can totally take either system and make it have many of the properties that our touted for each one. People take relational databases and turn them into schemaless or columnar stores all the time with eventually consistency (often with mysql). Particularly with Postgres as it is a platform (it has a powerful extension model). Regardless Cassandra is touted for analytics. The marketing really pushes it for that. Eventually consistency and columnar store is a good fit for real time analytics. Lots of data points, lots of aggregation, get to play with various queries in realtime, elasticity... etc. We will probably hit a wall with Postgres. All and all I think Cassandra is pretty good for what it does. Other than Redis, and maybe RethinkDB I think its my third NoSQL favorite (and yes I know each of those guys has a sweet spot for what they are good at requirement wise).

mrits 10y ago

From their front page: "allow for perfect scale-up linear performance of up to 1,000,000 read/write operations per node." What happens after 1M operations? The nodes catch on fire?

jazoom 10y ago
I know nothing about database architecture but I'm gonna assume that the individual operations take longer until you distribute the load across more nodes.
- glommer 10y ago
  Every system has a maximum capacity, and after that is reached, the requests just see increased latency without increased throughput. At this point you scale up (by replacing it with better hardware) or out (by adding more nodes).