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ScyllaDB vs. Apache Cassandra

ScyllaDB Provides Superior Performance with Less Administration, all at Lower Cost

ScyllaDB is an increasingly popular alternative NoSQL database to Apache Cassandra. Imagine all the goodness of Cassandra — same highly available ring architecture, same SSTable data format, same Apache Cassandra Query Language (CQL) — but without the Java overhead.

With ScyllaDB you will achieve higher performance at scale using dramatically fewer nodes, with far less administration, and lower infrastructure costs. You can even switch from Cassandra to ScyllaDB without interruption and commonly with no code changes. ScyllaDB is available as a fully managed service, an enterprise offering, and open source.

Gamechangers Who Switched from Cassandra to ScyllaDB

Comcast Xfinity improved user experience and shrank their cluster from 962 nodes with Cassandra to 78 nodes on ScyllaDB, reducing administrative overhead over 90%.

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Rakuten’s billion-item catalog 6x better performance while shrinking their cluster 70% moving from Cassandra to ScyllaDB. They also eliminated unpredictable latencies.

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Fanatics replaced 55 nodes of Cassandra with just 6 nodes of ScyllaDB. Discover why the brand that powers all NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL shops switched to ScyllaDB.

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Expedia, the travel booking giant, reduced P99 response times from >80ms to <5ms after migrating to ScyllaDB NoSQL. They also got 3x the throughput while saving 35%.

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Learn why and how Discord’s persistence team completed their most ambitious migration yet: moving their massive set of trillions of messages from Cassandra to ScyllaDB.

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GE Predix reduced administrative burden in their IIoT infrastructure to meet their SLAs, and shrank their Cassandra cluster of 75 nodes to just 15 nodes of ScyllaDB.

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ScyllaDB & Cassandra Commonalities & Differences

Apache Cassandra is one of the most popular databases in the world for many good reasons. ScyllaDB delivers the best of Cassandra and then exceeds its capabilities.
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Both NoSQL databases use a SQL-like query language; users do not need to alter queries moving to ScyllaDB from Cassandra.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB can take advantage of any CQL driver used by Apache Cassandra. These are available in many popular programming languages. Users can keep the exact same drivers if they wish.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB offers faster shard-aware drivers that provide superior performance in conjunction with ScyllaDB’s shard–per-core design. These drivers can add another 10% or more performance boost.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Allows users to specify various levels of consistency to tailor operations to their use cases. Consistency is set on an operation-by-operation basis.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Scale out to any number of nodes in a cluster. Since ScyllaDB is more efficient it can run the same workload on fewer nodes.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB scales up on larger, denser nodes with any number of CPUs, and any amount of RAM or storage. Cassandra is limited to 2 terabytes of data on a single node.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB accomplishes topology changes far faster than Cassandra, significantly reducing the time to resize and rebalance clusters.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB maintains smooth, single-digit millisecond P99 latencies and high throughput measured in millions of OPS. ScyllaDB uses less infrastructure to run the same workload as Cassandra with better outcomes.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB allows users to set prioritization for specific workloads, minimizing chances they have to be retried or dropped. Unique to ScyllaDB Enterprise and ScyllaDB Cloud.

Automatic Sharding
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Automatically balances and redistributes data across all the nodes in a cluster.

Leaderless Active-Active Clustering
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB and Cassandra both use active-active clustering. Every node accepts reads and writes.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Both offer cross-datacenter clustering and automatic multi-datacenter data replication.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Remains highly available for operations when facing node outages and network partitions.

Adapts in Real Time to Real World Workloads
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB’s CPU and I/O schedulers make adaptive changes to database behavior for optimum performance in real time. Cassandra requires complex manual JVM tuning which cannot reflect changing real-world conditions.

No “Stop the World” Garbage Collection (GC) Pauses
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB, written in C++, does not suffer from Cassandra’s “stop-the-world” pauses caused by Java Garbage Collection (GC).

NUMA-Aware
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB is NUMA-aware so your data in memory can be closely aligned to its assigned CPU core. The JVM Cassandra uses may or may not be NUMA-aware. 

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Both databases use SSTables — a fast, immutable Log Structured Merge (LSM) tree based storage format.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Both ScyllaDB & Cassandra support multiple compaction strategies to remove obsolete data and minimize storage on disk.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB’s incremental compaction strategy allows greater storage utilization. Unique to ScyllaDB Enterprise and ScyllaDB Cloud.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB’s I/O scheduler prioritizes foreground operations (reads and writes) over background compaction tasks, lowering impact during peak workloads.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Materialized views allow unique organization of information. Only ScyllaDB’s materialized views are production-ready; they are still experimental in Cassandra.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Allow users to organize information using non-partition key columns, but are limited to data stored in a specific node.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Global secondary indexes span all nodes in a cluster; they are more powerful but come at a cost in performance. Only ScyllaDB supports global secondary indexes

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

Lightweight Transactions, also called compare-and-set (CAS) operations, do a read-before-write to ensure strict linearizability (ordering) of operations. They use the Paxos consensus protocol to provide ACID-like consistency on a single partition basis. ScyllaDB’s LWT implementation is more efficient than Cassandra’s.

Change Data Capture (CDC) as CQL Queryable Tables
ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB offers CDC as standard CQL-queryable tables, making it easily consumable by applications and event streaming systems like Apache Kafka. Cassandra’s CDC implementation does not use the CQL interface and is not as elegant or efficient.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB uses a highly-efficient row-based data cache. Cassandra uses multiple layers of caching, including the OS-level cache, which is inelegant and inefficient.

ScyllaDB
Cassandra
Description

ScyllaDB allows queries to bypass the cache entirely on a per-operation basis, which is useful for range and full table scans.