ScyllaDB 2.0.3 with TLS now available on the IBM Cloud

ScyllaDB 2.0.3 is now available, in beta, through IBM Cloud Compose. The new release brings even more Cassandra-compatible features to Scylla, the high-performance, C++ based, in-place replacement for Cassandra. The Scylla 2.0.3 release also sees TLS encryption for clients switched on.

We introduced ScyllaDB at the end of 2016. It already stood out as a plug-compatible version of Cassandra at the time. The developers had taken Cassandra’s wide-column database design and built from the ground up a whole C++ framework and database on top of that. This meant the ideas behind Cassandra were freed from the performance limitations of the Java Virtual Machine. The ScyllaDB developers have since been regularly iterating their database while keeping it Cassandra compatible. They’ve also been carefully matching current Cassandra features, while advanced tuning of the internal mechanisms of ScyllaDB also lets them boost reliability and performance even more.

Scylla 2.0.3 features

Counters, one of the more requested features for current Cassandra compatibility. Counters deliver safely increment-able tables in a distributed system like Scylla. In 2.0.3, they become a production ready feature after being an experimental option in previous releases. Read more about Counters in the Scylla documentation.

As one feature enters production, a new experimental one arrives. In this case, it’s Materialized View support on Scylla. This allows tables to be created which are derived from the fields of another table while being indexed on fields that aren’t the primary key. That’s important in a database like Scylla; typically data is indexed and partitioned over nodes on the primary key and nothing else. These Materialized Views are real persisted stored tables, not queries run in the background. They provide a different way to slice your data models for efficient access. You can read more about it on the Scylla blog’s Materialized View preview and with an IBM Cloud Compose Scylla deployment, begin experimenting today.

Other Scylla 2.0 enhancements happen behind the scenes, as it were. An improved row cache means better use of memory, especially with large partitions. Heat Weighted Load Balancing is a new technique to direct traffic to hot busy caches while other nodes are coming up to speed; the idea is that if there’s a busy cache it’s likely to have the data needed anyway and it lets restarting nodes come online more quickly.

ScyllaDB and TLS

New instances of Compose for ScyllaDB require that users connect with TLS encryption enabled. This ensures that the client’s data exchange with the database is protected in flight. To verify connections the service uses Let’s Encrypt certificates which, generally, means no local certificate to store. For full details of how to use this, consult the documentation which has been updated to go with the new release.

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