How to Choose the Right Compaction Strategy for Workload Performance

Nadav Har'El, a software developer at ScyllaDB, discusses the importance of selecting the right compaction strategy to optimize workload performance on a ScyllaDB cluster in an interview ahead of the ScyllaDB Summit 2017. With a background in software development and open-source projects, Har'El highlights his early programming experiences and contributions to ScyllaDB and the Seastar programming framework. He plans to address the various compaction strategies used by ScyllaDB and Apache Cassandra at the summit, introducing a new strategy unique to ScyllaDB that aims to blend the best features of existing methods while avoiding their drawbacks. This new strategy is expected to cater to a wider range of workloads, providing automatic tuning to balance compaction speed and query performance, unlike the traditional user-controlled approach in Apache Cassandra. Har'El emphasizes the benefits of "workload conditioning" in ScyllaDB, which automatically adjusts the pace of compaction to maintain optimal request latency.