ScyllaDB Reviews

We have a business model that requires heavy reads for several applications all in one place. So we decided to use ScyllaDB because of the workload, to have multiple reads and writes at the same time.

I like how fast it is to query data from the ScyllaDB node! Because it can actually enable you to query any data from any node as fast as possible. And the ability to save the same copies of data across the cluster, depending on your setup as well. It's really fast.

Some of the regular commands in NoSQL do not work. It's Cassandra and ScyllaDB, so you have to make custom commands to be able to query data sometimes. It doesn't have universal compatibility. It will not allow you to make use of some functions. So, I have to do custom queries to query data.

I have been using it for about a year now.

I experienced one or two bugs, but for the database itself, it's stable. For other features, such as the ScyllaDB Manager (the one you use to control other nodes, make backups, and check the status of other nodes), there were issues. When you deploy ScyllaDB, you also deploy another instance for the manager that helps you control dashboards and visualizations. 

In the previous release, there were one or two things they had to correct, which sometimes caused unexplainable errors. You had to update to the latest version. But so far, their 3.3 version has been really stable. I updated it last week.

We have about two teams right now, so the number of people would be about eight to ten.

I have contacted the customer service and support. We are trying to move to the enterprise version because the open-source version is limited. 

I think everyone is trying to adopt ScyllaDB, and it's quite new. There isn't enough information on the Internet if you don't have support. So we are considering getting support as well.

ScyllaDB is trying to build their customer base right now. They are very on point. I've just had a few interactions with them, but I strongly agree that the support is very good.

Positive

We had a business model, and we tried to do a bit of research to see which one fits best. Because of ScyllaDB's scalability and high performance, they chose it. 

We are a financial institution and we have relationships with several banks and fintechs. So we have their data in-house, and we try to manipulate this data, derive analytics from it, save it in different forms, and manipulate it. 

ScyllaDB helps us manage high data volumes and support rapid read and write operations. It is also very effective when we demand high throughput with low latency and the ability to scale as fast as possible. 

We had existing databases such as Mongo and SQL Server, but we were having performance issues. We needed something to expand, something to have a broader reach, something to give us more robustness. So that was the reason why we went with ScyllaDB.

The initial setup is pretty easy. They have their documentation cut out really nicely. It's like the more regular installations you have to do for a database cluster. But, yeah, it's pretty easy.

We use the open-source version on-premises, but we're trying to move to the enterprise version. But currently, we are deployed on-premises.

It's a bit expensive. When we were given a quotation for our setup, it was actually quite expensive as well.

If you are not familiar with it at all and you're trying to adopt it for the first time, it's going to be incredibly difficult. It's a journey that we have passed through. Without proper support or without going for the cloud model or the enterprise model where you get support from ScyllaDB, I would advise against going for ScyllaDB.

But if you want to try it out to see what it can do, and you're okay with running without support, I'd say fine, you can use it. It's a really good database.

But if you've explained your business model and what you want to use it for, my first question would be whether you are okay with running without support. If you can't, I would ask you to just look somewhere else for something that works better for you.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten, with one being bad and ten being the best. I haven't really explored the full capabilities of ScyllaDB because without support, you don't know how efficient it can be and how your usage can be. 

The reason why I would say eight is because we've seen firsthand how ScyllaDB is able to manage a high workload. And because of its shared-nothing architecture, it distributes its views and processes.

We use the platform to manage advertising-related data, such as tracking ad views and demographic information.

The product's most valuable features are efficiency and reliability. Compared to similar tools, it consumes fewer computing resources and requires minimal maintenance, ensuring smooth operations.

I have been using ScyllaDB for approximately three years. 

We've had occasional performance challenges that required resource adjustments or optimizations in our interaction with the platform. However, the support team has responded and promptly resolved these issues.

I rate the stability a nine. 

The product is highly scalable.

The technical support team has been excellent. They are responsive and knowledgeable, providing timely assistance.

The initial setup has been straightforward in our experience. The deployment team handles the setup efficiently, typically completing it within a day with minimal involvement required from our side.

The product's efficiency has allowed us to optimize resource usage effectively. Its reliability reduces operational overhead, enabling us to focus resources on other critical tasks.

It is user-friendly for those familiar with databases. A basic understanding of database management is necessary for effective use and deployment.

I rate it a ten. 

Our company currently uses Scylla for our products since we are in the process of migration from Postgres.

Our company is reimplementing the user data pipeline and needs faster results. We found Scylla to be preferable for our use case from the alternatives we evaluated.

User-defined type in Scylla allows for data to be consistent. The performance aspects of Scylla are good, as always. The product's flexibility allows us to use Cassandra SDK with it while also being able to migrate from DynamoDB to it. A good point about Scylla is that it can be used extensively.

It has just been a month or so for me with Scylla. The documentation of Scylla is an area with shortcomings and needs to be improved. Improvement of documentation is needed considering that I work with Java. We currently use a data stack model, which is actually for Cassandra. There is no different dependency for Scylla, so it's adding a wrapper on the SDK that Cassandra supports, and we end up just using it.

I think it's good as it is. I don't have any input on what needs to be added in Scylla.

I have experience with Scylla for around two months. Currently, I am learning more about Scylla. I am using the solution's latest version. My company is a system integrator. We have different verticals, and one of it is that we are moving into is integrating, which is running our product as a binary in our enterprise solution and on clients' machines.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Currently, we are involved with Scylla's prototype version. For the project that I am working on, Scylla is not being used, and it is not just the case with my project alone but also with a huge number of projects because they are moving to cloud-agnostic architecture. We are moving all the DynamoDB databases to Scylla. Within a year or so, all of our DynamoDB databases will be replaced.

To be able to rate Scylla's scalability, we would need time since we are using its prototype.

Previously, I have used MongoDB for other projects.

We actually are not switching from MongoDB. We have a couple of alternatives for what we are building, and we wanted to know about SQL because we may have to change our schema quite a bit because we used to have a lot of metadata, and that's why the traditional RDBMS will have to split the columns instead of rows, making it very intense.

Scylla is a cloud-based solution. We are moving to a cloud-agnostic architecture, so we would have different instances based on our enterprise solution or the client.

Whether to use a private or public cloud depends on the requirements of our clients.

In my local environment, the installation part was quite easy because it's a Docker installation. I don't know about the remote installations with Kubernetes because that is managed by the cloud tech team.

I have been working on the solution for around a month, so it is mostly the people involved in the cloud tech department who look at things like the maintenance of the solution, an area in which I have no idea.

A weird error can pop up owing to the flaws in the documentation, because of which I am using an ORM tool to interact with the database. If required in a particular use case, I return a list of objects, or a list of a user data type, when it throws an error indicating that I should reimplement the codec. When I changed the codec to set, it started working fine. The aforementioned issue was not figurable even in Stack Overflow.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scylla is used as a cache. Once the data is ingested into the product during the initial load, a version of it is stored in Scylla DB, and this is then used by the other transformation services to query and make updates during ongoing loads. That is, it is being queried by other services to make the updates whenever deletes occur.

It is lightweight, and it requires less infrastructure.

Data export, along with how we can purchase the data periodically, needs to be improved so that the storage is within control. Then, we could optimize it even better.

This is not a very old product, and it's seven or eight months old.

We would like to leverage it on the public cloud, but due to some limitations at the moment, it's on the cloud but using IAS. We have virtual machines, and there, we have created the cluster.

It's pretty much stable. We have been in production for six months now, and I haven't seen it go down. We have had a few instances where one or two of the nodes have gone down, but the cluster has been stable.

Scalability in performance is good. We can add more nodes and have more scalability. We have about 200 people using this solution.

Support and the availability of support need improvement. I would give them a six out of ten.

Neutral

The architecture team did some tests and performance benchmarking, and they found out that in comparison to that for other tools almost one eighth or one tenth of the infrastructure was required for Scylla and that the performance was the same.

This is built on using C++, and it's very lightweight, whereas the others were using too much infrastructure. These are some of the reasons why Scylla was chosen.

I believe that there is a yearly licensing cost and that it's expensive.

The architecture team evaluated MongoDB and Cassandra.

Overall, I would give Scylla a seven out of ten for our use case.