Why TRACTIAN Migrated from MongoDB to ScyllaDB for Real-Time ML

TRACTIAN, an AI-driven industrial monitoring company, faced significant performance issues with MongoDB as their machine learning workloads doubled, prompting them to migrate to ScyllaDB for better real-time data handling. The company experienced degraded performance due to the constant influx of time-series sensor data, which compromised latency targets. Benchmarking showed that ScyllaDB offered a 10x improvement in throughput and latency over MongoDB, with operational simplicity surpassing Cassandra. TRACTIAN implemented a four-phase migration strategy to transition critical workloads to ScyllaDB while maintaining 99.95% availability. The migration involved dual writes, historical backfill, read switching, and final validation, which helped them eliminate hotspot issues and optimize query performance for time-window searches. The migration was executed without downtime, and ScyllaDB now serves as a cornerstone of TRACTIAN's infrastructure, though MongoDB is still used for other applications.