ScyllaDB is pleased to announce the availability of ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021, a production-ready ScyllaDB Enterprise major release. After more than 2,500 commits originating from five open source releases, we’re excited to now move forward with ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021. This release marks a significant milestone for us. While we’ve said for years we are a drop-in replacement for Apache Cassandra we are now also a drop-in replacement for Amazon DynamoDB.
ScyllaDB Enterprise builds on the proven features and capabilities of ScyllaDB Open Source NoSQL Database and provides greater reliability from additional vigorous testing, as well as a set of unique enterprise-only features. ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021 is immediately available for all ScyllaDB Enterprise customers, and provides a 30-day trial version for those interested in testing its capabilities against their own use cases.
Space Amplification Goal (SAG) for ICS
Incremental Compaction Strategy (ICS) was introduced in ScyllaDB Enterprise 2019.1.4. While this feature provides significant savings for disk space, it came at the cost of write amplification. A new feature of ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021.1 is Space Amplification Goal (SAG), a new property that allows users to fine tune a balance between space amplification and write amplification. This new feature is aimed at ScyllaDB users with overwrite-intensive workloads, automatically triggering compaction to deduplicate data whenever the compaction strategy finds that space amplification has crossed the configured threshold set by a user for SAG. LEARN MORE
Remove the Seed Concept in Gossip
The concept of seed and the different behavior between seed nodes and non-seed nodes generate a lot of confusion, complication, and error for users. Starting with this release, seed nodes are ignored in the Gossip protocol. They are still in use (for now) as part of the init process. LEARN MORE
Binary Search in SSTable Promoted Index
The binary search dramatically improves index lookup, making them 12x faster, while reducing CPU utilization to only 1/10th or 10% and disk I/O to 1/20th or 5% the prior rates. Before ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021.1, lookups in the promoted index were done by scanning the index linearly, so that the lookup took O(n) time. This is inefficient for large partitions, consuming a great deal of CPU and I/O. Now the reader scans the SSTable promoted index with a binary search, reducing search time to O(log n). LEARN MORE
Alternator, Our DynamoDB-Compatible API
Amazon DynamoDB users can more easily switch to ScyllaDB, deploying your database on-premises, or on any cloud of your choice. ScyllaDB significantly reduces the total cost of ownership, delivers lower and more consistent latencies, and expands the limitations DynamoDB places on object size, partition size, etc. The following new features have been added to Alternator since the 2020.1 release:
- Alternator now offers a Load Balancer to distribute requests smoothly across the entire cluster, rather than directing all queries to a single IP address connected to one node.
- New Alternator SSL options (Alternator Client to Node Encryption on Transit). Beginning with this release, the new
alternator_encryption_optionsparameter is used to define Alternator SSL options. - New option to start Alternator with HTTPS on Docker containers to provide data-in-transit security.
- Added FilterExpression – provides a newer syntax for filtering results of Query and Scan requests.
- Now allows users to choose the isolation level per table. If they do not use one, a default isolation level is set.
- Allow access to system tables from the Alternator REST API.
- Now support the ScanIndexForward option of a query expression. By default, the query sort order is ascending. Setting ScanIndexForward to False parameter reverses the order.
See AWS DynamoDB Query API
ScyllaDB Unified Installer
ScyllaDB is now available as an all-in-one binary tar file. Unified Installer should be used when one does not have root privileges on the server. For installation on an air-gap server, with no external access, it is recommended to download the standard packages, copy them to the air gap server and install using the standard package manager. LEARN MORE
Security Updates
We are constantly improving product security. ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021.1 addresses the following issues:
- A new optional CQL port (19042 by default) is being open for ScyllaDB advanced shard-aware drivers. It works exactly like the typical 9042 works for existing drivers (connector libraries), but it allows the client to choose the specific shard to connect to by precise binding of the client-side (ephemeral) port. Also, a TLS alternative is supported, under port 19142. LEARN MORE
- Now allow users to disable CQL unencrypted native transport by setting it to zero.
- ScyllaDB now supports hot reloading of SSL Certificates. If SSL/TLS support is enabled, then whenever the files are changed on disk, ScyllaDB will reload them and use them for subsequent connections.
- GnuTLS vulnerability: GNUTLS-SA-2020-09-04 #7212
Next Steps
To get started with ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021, either as an existing customer or for a 30-day trial, head to our Download Center. You can also check out our Documentation, including the Getting Started and Upgrade Guide sections, as well as our Release Notes. You can also sign up for ScyllaDB Cloud, our fully managed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) which is based on ScyllaDB Enterprise.
If you have questions about using ScyllaDB Enterprise in your own organization, feel free to contact us to speak with our sales and solutions team members, or join our ScyllaDB Slack community to communicate directly with our engineers and your industry peers.
