History[06][05][07]

Scylla project is started in 2014 by an Israel startup Cloudius Systems (rebranded as ScyllaDB Inc.), lead by Avi Kivity and Dor Laor. It is a C++ rewritten implementation of Apache Cassandra in Java, and is released as open source in 2015. The current (late 2018) version is 3.0.

Checkpoints[08]

Scylla supports non-blocking checkpoints through per-node backup procedures, which include full backup/snapshots and incremental backup. Snapshots are taken by the snapshot operation provided by the nodetool utility, while the incremental backup option can be configured in the configuration file. Automatic unnecessary backup cleaning is not implemented.

Compression[09]

Scylla uses Apache Cassandra chunked compression on SSTable files. Three dictionary-based compression algorithms are provided: LZ4 (default), Snappy, and DEFLATE. Data needs to be decompressed before being processed during query execution.

Concurrency Control[10][11]

Scylla does not support ACID transactions as in RDBMS. However, CQL has a BATCH statement that allows multiple update statements belonging to a given partition key be applied in isolation (note that batches are not a full analogue for SQL transactions). Besides, in UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE statements, modifications belonging to the same partition key are performed atomically and in isolation. Scylla implements Multi-version Concurrency Control (MVCC) for partition mutation.

Data Model

Foreign Keys[12]

Isolation Levels

Joins[13]

Each SELECT statement only applies on one single table.

Query Interface[14][15]

Scylla uses Cassandra Query Language (CQL) as the Query Interface. Besides, drivers for the following languages are provided: C++, C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Rust.

Stored Procedures

System Architecture[16][17]

Scylla uses a shared-nothing model. Nodes in the cluster are organized in a decentralized consistent hashing ring and data is partitioned into shards by the key across all nodes. Scylla uses a shard-per-core architecture, where each thread for a shard executes on its own CPU core, memory, and multi-queue network interface controller. Cross-core communication is carried out by explicit message passing. Scylla also uses replicas for fault-tolerance.