ScyllaDB 6.0 has been released with two major features that change the way it works: a dynamic way to distribute data across nodes that significantly improves scalability; and support for strongly consistent topology updates

ScyllaDB is an open source NoSQL database that's compatible with Apache Cassandra. The developers of Scylla describe it as a much faster drop-in replacement for Apache Cassandra.

ScyllaDB 6 improvements start with the addition of Tablets, a new data distribution algorithm. This replaces the previous vNodes approach that was based on the way Apache Cassandra handles nodes.

The ScyllaDB team says that while the vNodes approach statically distributes all tables across all nodes and shards based on the token ring, the Tablets approach dynamically distributes each table to a subset of nodes and shards based on its size. In the future, distribution will use CPU, OPS, and other information to further optimize the distribution.

The developers say Tablets provide faster scaling and topology changes, because new nodes can start serving reads and writes as soon as the first Tablet is migrated. There's now automatic support for mixed clusters with different core counts, and more efficient operations on small tables, since such tables are placed on a small subset of nodes and shards.

The other main improvement in this release is strongly consistent topology updates. With Raft-managed topology enabled, all topology operations are internally sequenced consistently, and a centralized coordination process means that topology metadata is synchronized across the nodes on each step of a topology change procedure.

This makes topology updates fast and safe, as the cluster administrator can trigger many topology operations concurrently. Other cluster metadata elements are now strongly consistent, including authorisation updates so Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) commands like create role or grant permission are safe to run in parallel; and service levels have also been made strongly consistent, meaning administrators can define attributes such as timeout per workload.

The new release of ScyllaDB is available from the website. 

More Information

ScyllaDB Homepage

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