Overheard at Distributed Data Summit 2018

The Distributed Data Summit 2018 in San Francisco brought together NoSQL practitioners with a focus on Apache Cassandra and its ecosystem. Keynote speaker Nate McCall highlighted the current state and updates of Cassandra 4.0, including features like Transient Replicas and Zero Copy Streaming, and addressed issues such as the legacy "tick-tock" release model and the state of Materialized Views. The summit also saw discussions on the divergence between commercial vendors and open-source contributors. A session by ScyllaDB CEO Dor Laor examined the decision to base ScyllaDB on Cassandra, focusing on the benefits of inherited features alongside operational challenges. ScyllaDB's CTO Avi Kivity presented on the advantages of ScyllaDB's thread-per-core architecture, showcasing its potential for reducing hardware needs and improving performance. Additionally, Kivity explored how ScyllaDB can support both OLTP and OLAP workloads on the same infrastructure through workload isolation, with promising results. The event underscored ongoing innovations and challenges in the NoSQL space, with a focus on improving performance, scalability, and operational management.