Your Questions about Cassandra 4.0 vs. ScyllaDB 4.4 Answered

A webinar was held to address the significant interest generated by benchmark reports comparing the performance of Apache Cassandra 4.0 to Cassandra 3.11 and ScyllaDB 4.4, covering a range of technical inquiries. The discussion featured ScyllaDB engineers Piotr Grabowski and Karol Baryla, who clarified that their benchmarks utilized open-source versions of Cassandra and did not employ off-heap memtables due to stability issues. They also addressed questions about using Java 16 with Cassandra 4.0, the performance capabilities of ScyllaDB with its shard-aware drivers, and the implications of low latency on cache use. The engineers explained data distribution and compaction during node additions and contrasted performance enhancements between Cassandra and ScyllaDB, attributing ScyllaDB's superior performance to its C++ foundation and shard-aware architecture. The session highlighted the importance of understanding workload-specific requirements and the potential impact of different configurations on performance outcomes.