Yahoo! Japan: Using ScyllaDB and Cassandra at Scale

Yahoo! Japan, a dominant internet brand in Japan since 1996, utilizes a diverse technological infrastructure to support its wide array of services, including mobile advertising, online stores, and payment systems. To manage the data demands of its extensive user base, the company employs a range of databases, including Oracle, MySQL, Teradata, HBase, and notably, Apache Cassandra and ScyllaDB for NoSQL needs. At the ScyllaDB Summit 2018, Yahoo! Japan's engineers discussed their testing of ScyllaDB against Apache Cassandra, highlighting several performance issues with Cassandra related to Java Virtual Machine's garbage collection and node maintenance. Their benchmarks demonstrated that while Cassandra and ScyllaDB performed similarly at lower thread counts, ScyllaDB significantly outperformed Cassandra as thread counts increased, offering better latency and resource utilization, despite some operational challenges. This testing underscored ScyllaDB's potential advantages in performance and stability over Cassandra, suggesting that ScyllaDB could handle higher loads more efficiently without frequent crashes, although Cassandra's many tunable parameters offer both flexibility and complexity.