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CERN discusses the ALICE Environment at ScyllaDB Summit 2017

I was pleased to sit down with Miguel Pedreira of CERN to learn more about his upcoming talk, ‘A Future-Proof Global File Catalogue for the ALICE Experiment’ at ScyllaDB Summit 2017. At ScyllaDB Summit 2017, participants will join NoSQL developers and users from startups and the enterprise for two days of sharing ideas, hearing innovating use cases, and getting real-life tips and tricks from their peers and NoSQL idols. Let’s begin the interview and learn more about what Miguel will be presenting at the Summit.

Please tell us about yourself and what you do at CERN?

My name is Miguel Pedreira and I work at CERN as a software engineer. I am a core developer of a distributed computing infrastructure used for running physics analysis worldwide.

What will you be talking about at ScyllaDB Summit 2017?

We will face enhancements in the ALICE experiment that will translate into improving the performance and scalability of our main database. We will show the process and details of our migration to Apache Cassandra/ScyllaDB.

What type of audience will be interested in your talk?

People trying to migrate their current database to an Apache Cassandra-based approach and want to see our lessons learned and performance results. Also, anyone that is interested in discovering a solution for a filesystem use case.

Can you please tell me more about your talk?

Our database use-case is the global metadata catalog of the ALICE experiment at CERN that facilitates file information to the agents running analysis in a distributed computing infrastructure now formed by 80 computer centers worldwide. The production implementation and performance will be shown and how we are re-designing the database using new technology (Apache Cassandra/ScyllaDB) to satisfy our future needs as well as to get rid of critical limitations of the current system. The differences between the schema paradigms and advantages from SQL to NoSQL, performance tuning and results, and experiences will be exposed. In addition, a comparison between Apache Cassandra and ScyllaDB on our candidate hardware will be presented. The exploration of big data tools such as Spark to process our database information is also planned.

Where can we learn more information about your talk?

Check out the first design (schema outdated) and system description links:

How can the people get in touch with you?

The best way to get in touch with me is through email and LinkedIn.

Thank you very much, Miguel. We can not wait to see your talk in person and learn more. If you want to attend ScyllaDB Summit 2017 and enjoy more talks like this one.

ScyllaDB Summit is taking place in San Francisco, CA on October 24-25. Check out our web site to learn about the rest of the talks—including technical talks from the ScyllaDB team, the ScyllaDB road map, and a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn how to get the most out of your ScyllaDB cluster.

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