As 2023 draws to a close, let’s take a moment to look back at our top 10 NoSQL blogs written this year – plus 10 “timeless classics” that continue to attract attention.
Before we start, a heartfelt thanks to the many community members who contributed to our blogs in various ways – from customers sharing best practices at ScyllaDB Summit, to open source contributors and ScyllaDB engineers explaining how they raised the bar on what’s possible for NoSQL performance, to anyone who has initiated or contributed to the discussion on Hacker News, Reddit, and other platforms.
Drumroll, please! Here are the most-read NoSQL blogs that we published in 2023:
Introducing “Database Performance at Scale”: A Free, Open Source Book
Introducing “Database Performance at Scale”: A Free, Open Source BookBy Dor Laor
Introducing a new book that provides practical guidance for understanding the opportunities, trade-offs, and traps you might encounter while trying to optimize data-intensive applications for high throughput and low latency.
- Read: Introducing “Database Performance at Scale”: A Free, Open Source Book
- Related: Free Masterclass on Database Performance at Scale
Why ScyllaDB is Moving to a New Replication Algorithm: Tablets
Why ScyllaDB is Moving to a New Replication Algorithm: TabletsBy Tomasz Grabiec
How moving from Vnode-based replication to tablets helps dynamically distribute data across the cluster, ultimately increasing ScyllaDB’s elasticity.
- Read: Why ScyllaDB is Moving to a New Replication Algorithm: Tablets
- Related: ScyllaDB Summit 24 (Free + Virtual)
Top Mistakes with ScyllaDB: Storage
Top Mistakes with ScyllaDB: StorageBy Felipe Cardeneti Mendes
All about disk types, best practices, common misconceptions, filesystem types, RAID setups, tunable parameters, and what makes disks so special in the context of databases.
- Read: Top Mistakes with ScyllaDB: Storage
- Related: Getting the Most Out of ScyllaDB: From Evaluation to Production
When to Use ScyllaDB vs MongoDB: Lessons Learned From 5+ Years in Production
When to Use ScyllaDB vs MongoDB: Lessons Learned From 5+ Years in ProductionBy Cynthia Dunlop
Numberly has been using both ScyllaDB and MongoDB in production for 5+ years. Learn which NoSQL database they rely on for different use cases and why.
- Read: When to Use ScyllaDB vs MongoDB: Lessons Learned From 5+ Years in Production
- Related: A Technical Comparison of MongoDB vs ScyllaDB
Benchmarking MongoDB vs ScyllaDB: Performance, Scalability & Cost
Benchmarking MongoDB vs ScyllaDB: Performance, Scalability & CostBy Dr. Daniel Seybold
Dr. Daniel Seybold shares how MongoDB and ScyllaDB compare on throughput, latency, scalability, and price-performance in this third-party benchmark by benchANT.
- Read: Benchmarking MongoDB vs ScyllaDB: Performance, Scalability & Cost
- Related: Extended Benchmark Report
How Numberly Replaced Kafka with a Rust-Based ScyllaDB Shard-Aware Application
How Numberly Replaced Kafka with a Rust-Based ScyllaDB Shard-Aware ApplicationBy Alexys Jacob
How Numberly used Rust & ScyllaDB to replace Kafka, streamlining the way all its AdTech components send and track messages (whatever their form).
- Read: How Numberly Replaced Kafka with a Rust-Based ScyllaDB Shard-Aware Application
- Related: How Palo Alto Networks Replaced Kafka with ScyllaDB for Stream Processing
ScyllaDB Open Source 5.2: With Raft-Based Schema Management
ScyllaDB Open Source 5.2: With Raft-Based Schema ManagementBy Tzach Livyatan
ScyllaDB 5.2 introduces Raft-based strongly consistent schema management, DynamoDB Alternator TTL, and many more improvements and bug fixes.
- Read: ScyllaDB Open Source 5.2: With Raft-Based Schema Management
- Related: ScyllaDB’s Path to Strong Consistency: A New Milestone
5 Intriguing ScyllaDB Capabilities You Might Have Overlooked
5 Intriguing ScyllaDB Capabilities You Might Have OverlookedBy Felipe Cardeneti Mendes
A look at 5 “hidden gem” ScyllaDB capabilities that help ScyllaDB power users: workload prioritization, heat-weighted load balancing, per shard concurrency limit, per partition rate limit, and bypass cache.
- Read: 5 Intriguing ScyllaDB Capabilities You Might Have Overlooked
- Related: 5 More Intriguing ScyllaDB Capabilities You Might Have Overlooked
MongoDB vs Postgres vs ScyllaDB: Tractian’s Benchmarking and Migration
MongoDB vs Postgres vs ScyllaDB: Tractian’s Benchmarking and MigrationBy João Pedro Voltani and João Granzotti
TRACTIAN shares their comparison of ScyllaDB vs MongoDB and PostgreSQL, then provides an overview of their MongoDB to ScyllaDB migration process, challenges & results.
- Read: MongoDB vs Postgres vs ScyllaDB: Tractian’s Benchmarking and Migration
- Related: From Postgres to ScyllaDB: Migration Strategies and Performance Gains
Rust in the Real World: Super Fast Data Ingestion Using ScyllaDB
Rust in the Real World: Super Fast Data Ingestion Using ScyllaDBBy Javier Ramos
A walk through of a real-world use case where 1) You have hierarchical or graph data stored in an S3 data lake, 2) You need to ingest it with high throughput and speed into ScyllaDB, and 3) You need to traverse or search the graph very fast.
- Read: Rust in the Real World: Super Fast Data Ingestion Using ScyllaDB
Related: Developer Workshop: Build Low-Latency Applications in Rust on ScyllaDB
Bonus: Top NoSQL Database Blogs From Years Past
Many of the blogs published in previous years continued to resonate with the community. Here’s a rundown of 10 enduring favorites:
- Shaving 40% Off Google’s B-Tree Implementation with Go Generics (Michal Matczuk) – How we achieved a 40% performance gain in an already well optimized package, the Google B-Tree implementation, using Go generics. (2022)
- How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux (Glauber Costa) – How io_uring and eBPF will change the way programmers develop asynchronous interfaces and execute arbitrary code, such as tracepoints, more securely. (2020)
- Benchmarking Apache Cassandra (40 Nodes) vs ScyllaDB (4 Nodes) (Juliusz Stasiewicz, Piotr Grabowski, and Karol Baryla) – We benchmarked Apache Cassandra on 40 nodes vs ScyllaDB on just 4 nodes. See how they stacked up on throughput, latency, and cost. (2022)
- The Taming of the B-Trees (Pavel “Xemul” Emelyanov) – Discover how and why ScyllaDB engineers implemented B-tree and B+-tree data structures in their NoSQL distributed database. We share the practical details you won’t read in books. (2021)
- Async Rust in Practice: Performance, Pitfalls, Profiling (Piotr Sarna) – How our engineers used flamegraphs to diagnose and resolve performance issues in our Tokio framework based Rust driver. (2022)
- Why Disney+ Hotstar Replaced Redis and Elasticsearch with ScyllaDB Cloud (Cynthia Dunlop) – Get the inside perspective on how Disney+ Hotstar simplified its “continue watching” data architecture for scale. (2022)
- Different I/O Access Methods for Linux, What We Chose for ScyllaDB, and Why (Avi Kivity) – Explore the four different ways to perform disk I/O on Linux , the tradeoffs, and what we chose when designing a high-performing database, ScyllaDB. (2017)
- A New ScyllaDB Go Driver: Faster Than GoCQL and Its Rust Counterpart (Paweł Putra) – How we built a new Go ScyllaDB driver that’s almost 4x faster than its GoCQL predecessor and 2X faster than its Rust counterpart. (2022)
- Using Spring Boot, ScyllaDB and Time Series Data (Lubos Kosco) – Learn how to use Spring Boot apps with ScyllaDB for time series data, taking advantage of shard-aware drivers and prepared statements. (2021)
- NoSQL vs. NewSQL: CockroachDB vs. ScyllaDB (Ivan Prisyazhynyy) – NewSQL and NoSQL are both designs for distributed databases that go beyond the capabilities of a traditional RDBMS. But how are they similar and how do they differ? See this apples-and-oranges comparison of CockroachDB to ScyllaDB. (2021)
