Book Excerpt: ScyllaDB versus Other Databases

Bo Ingram's book excerpt on ScyllaDB provides a comprehensive comparison of ScyllaDB with various other database systems, emphasizing its design as a distributed NoSQL database with native support for horizontal scalability and BASE consistency. ScyllaDB distinguishes itself from traditional relational databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL by offering improved availability and scalability through its distributed architecture, although it lacks ACID guarantees. The excerpt highlights ScyllaDB's advantages over Apache Cassandra, as it is a C++ rewrite aimed at overcoming Cassandra's Java-related performance limitations, particularly in terms of memory management and query execution. ScyllaDB also offers a unique shard-per-core architecture that enhances performance by allocating dedicated resources to each shard within a node. While ScyllaDB competes with cloud-hosted databases such as Amazon DynamoDB and Google Cloud Spanner, it remains a versatile choice as it can be deployed on-premises or across various cloud providers, avoiding vendor lock-in. The excerpt acknowledges that while ScyllaDB offers significant benefits in terms of scalability and performance, it may not always be the best fit, particularly for applications requiring strong transactional consistency or simpler operational management, where traditional relational databases or managed services might be more appropriate.