April 2017 Summaries

The blog presents a detailed 12-hour benchmark comparison of two NoSQL databases, Aerospike 3.8.2.3 and Cassandra 3.5.0, under mixed read-write loads typical of modern internet applications. Using the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB), Aerospike demonstrated significantly higher performance, achieving 14 times the throughput, 42 times lower read latency, and 24 times lower write latency (both at the 95th percentile) compared to Cassandra. This performance efficiency allows Aerospike to handle more requests with fewer servers, reducing hardware and maintenance costs. The blog emphasizes the importance of thorough benchmarking over extended periods to capture the true performance of databases, suggesting that Aerospike's consistent and predictable performance can be crucial for operational reliability. The blog also provides comprehensive details for replicating the benchmark, highlighting the potential cost-effectiveness and reliability of Aerospike for growing businesses.

Aerospike has released version 3.12 with new features such as in-database filtering, performance optimizations with CPU pinning and NUMA enhancements, scale-up improvements, namespace and set truncation, incremental backup and restore, and the Aerospike Management Console v4.0. These updates aim to provide a highly scalable and performant database for various industries including financial services, e-commerce, telecommunications, and retail. The in-database filtering feature enables users to write arbitrary expressions and filter query and scan results based on individual column contents. Performance optimizations with CPU pinning and NUMA enhancements aim to extend Aerospike's lead in database performance by increasing speed for metadata operations like "find most recently changed items" or "items that will expire soon". Scale-up improvements increase the number of objects per namespace per server from 4 billion to 32 billion, allowing each namespace to consume up to 2 TB of DRAM in each node. Namespace and set truncation allows for quick and efficient removal of data from individual sets and namespaces with a single administration command or API call. Incremental backup and restore enables only backing up the records that have changed since a certain time, improving efficiency and practicality for commercial deployments. The Aerospike Management Console v4.0 is a web-based tool to monitor and manage an Aerospike cluster, providing live updates to the current status of a cluster and includes features such as enabling basic HTTP authentication, configuring clusters that are always permanently monitored, connecting to a TLS-enabled secure Aerospike cluster, persisting notifications even after closing your browser, and configuring emails to receive Aerospike cluster alerts.