ScyllaDB Announces 4.0 Release of Its Open Source NoSQL Database

New release adds DynamoDB-compatible API along with advanced features for consistency, streaming and management

PALO ALTO, CALIF. — May 7, 2020 — ScyllaDB today announced ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0, the latest major release of its high-performance NoSQL database for real-time big data workloads. The release of this new version of ScyllaDB’s open source NoSQL database, marks a significant milestone, as the company has moved beyond feature parity with Apache Cassandra, now also serving as an open source drop-in, no-lock-in alternative to Amazon DynamoDB.

ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0 builds on ScyllaDB’s close-to-the-hardware design, which enables optimal use of modern server infrastructure. Written from the ground-up in C++, ScyllaDB delivers performance of millions of OPS on a single node, scales out to hundreds of nodes and consistently achieves a 99% tail latency of less than one millisecond.

As a drop-in replacement for Cassandra and, now, DynamoDB, ScyllaDB delivers better, more consistent performance, a significant reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) and greater deployment flexibility. The production-ready new features in ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0 extend an already impressive set of advantages over Apache Cassandra, including scaling up to any number of cores, streaming data to 60TB meganodes, built-in schedulers, unified cache and self-tuning operations.

Performance comparisons show ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0 delivers more than 5X higher throughput and nearly 10X lower P99 latencies than the upcoming Apache Cassandra 4.0 release. Additionally, benchmarks illustrate that ScyllaDB is roughly 1/8 the total cost of Amazon DynamoDB.

“ScyllaDB is faster and easier to manage than the other NoSQL databases we evaluated,” said Devin Rose, Principal Software Engineer at robotics pioneer KUKA. “We considered several other options, but ScyllaDB proved to be much more cost-effective. We’re excited about the new features ScyllaDB is adding. Their new DynamoDB-compatible API will make it even easier for users to enjoy ScyllaDB’s benefits of performance, affordability and more flexible deployment options.”

New Capabilities in ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0

• Alternator, a DynamoDB-compatible API: ScyllaDB 4.0 provides a production-ready Amazon DynamoDB-compatible API that lets DynamoDB users switch to ScyllaDB without changing a single line of application code. 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. Developers are no longer locked in to a platform and have new open source database options available to them. They can run on-premises, on their preferred cloud platforms or on ScyllaDB’s fully managed database as a service, ScyllaDB Cloud. They are free to access their data as they like, without pay-per-operation fees, and with more deployment options, including open source Docker and Kubernetes.
• Lightweight Transactions (LWT): ScyllaDB’s Lightweight Transactions (LWT) extends ScyllaDB’s options for data consistency. By employing Paxos two-phase-commit, ScyllaDB LWT makes operations strongly consistent.
• Change Data Capture (Beta): Allows users to track changes in their data, recording both the original data values and the new values to records. With CDC, ScyllaDB streams changes to a standard CQL table that can be indexed or filtered to find critical changes to data. The new API offers functionality that’s superior to both Cassandra and DynamoDB.
• Kubernetes Operator for ScyllaDB (Beta): Kubernetes enables automated provisioning of cloud-native containerized applications, supporting the entire lifecycle of deployment, scaling and management. ScyllaDB Operator, now in beta with ScyllaDB 4.0, is a Kubernetes extension for ScyllaDB cluster management. It currently supports deploying multi-zone clusters, scaling up or adding new racks, scaling down and monitoring ScyllaDB clusters with Prometheus and Grafana.

“ScyllaDB 4.0 is our largest release ever, with improvements ranging from ease-of-use to new APIs and functionality and performance,” said Dor Laor, CEO and co-founder, ScyllaDB. “We welcome developers to discover the great performance ScyllaDB offers out of the box, at a reasonable price and without lock-in.”

For more information on ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0, please visit scylladb.com

Upcoming Webinar: Introducing ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0
On May 21, join ScyllaDB co-founders Dor Laor and Avi Kivity for an overview of ScyllaDB Open Source 4.0, including comparisons with the upcoming Apache Cassandra 4.0. To register: https://www.scylladb.com/webinar/on-demand-webinar-introducing-scylla-open-source-4-0-new-features-and-comparisons-with-cassandra-4-0/