[RELEASE] Scylla 3.3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1)
Tzach Livyatan
<tzach@scylladb.com>The Scylla team is pleased to announce the release of Scylla Open Source 3.3 RC1, the first Release Candidate for Scylla Open Source 3.3. Moving forward, only critical bugs will be fixed in branch-3.3. We will continue to fix bugs and add features to the master branch.
Scylla 3.3 is focused on bug fixes and stability, as well as new deployment options (CentOS 8)
Scylla 3.3 includes major new or modified experimental features, including Lightweight Transactions (LWT), Change Data Capture (CDC), our Amazon DynamoDB Compatible API (Alternator) and Lua language based User Defined Functions (UDFs). These features are experimental and you are welcome to try them out and share feedback. Once stabilized they will be promoted to General Availability (GA) in a followup Scylla release (see more below).
Scylla is an open source, Apache-Cassandra-compatible NoSQL database, with superior performance and consistently low latencies. Find the Scylla Open Source 3.3 repository for your Linux distribution here (under More Versions). Scylla 3.3 RC1 Docker is available.
Use the release candidate with caution; RC1 is not production-ready yet. You can help us stabilize Scylla Open Source 3.3 by reporting bugs here.
Please note that only the last two minor releases of Scylla Open Source project are supported. Once Scylla Open Source 3.3 is officially released, only Scylla Open Source 3.3 and Scylla 3.2 will be supported, and Scylla 3.1 will be retired.
Related Links
* Get Scylla Open Source 3.3 (under “More Versions” for each distro)
* Upgrade from Scylla 3.2 to Scylla 3.3
New in Scylla 3.3
* Packages for CentOS 8
* Snapshot enhancement: a table schema, schema.cql, is now part of each Scylla snapshot created with “nodetool snapshot”. Schema is required as part of the Scylla backup restore procedure. #4192
* Connection virtual table #4820
The new table system.clients table provides information about CQL clients currently connected to Scylla.
Client Information includes: address, port, type, shard, protocol_version and username
* Stability: Large collections are now more resistant to memory fragmentation
* Stability: scylla-kernel-conf package which tunes the kernel for Scylla's needs. It now tunes vm.swappiness, to * Reduce the probability of the kernel swapping out Scylla memory and introducing stalls.
* Redis API: the ECHO command is now supported
* Export system uptime via REST endpoint /system/uptime_ms
New Experimental features in Scylla 3.3
* User Defined Functions #2204
Scylla now has basic support Lua based UDF.
Scylla UDF are similar to Apache Cassandra UDF, but implemented with Lua
Example:
CREATE FUNCTION twice(val int)
RETURNS NULL ON NULL INPUT
RETURNS int
LANGUAGE Lua
AS 'return 2 * val';
SELECT twice(key) from tbl;
Please note UDF are under development, and are still missing integration with RBAC, Scylla Tracing and Scylla monitoring. More on UDFA and UDA here
The following experimental features were already available in Scylla 3.2, and we continue to improve and stabilize them toward production in one of the following Scylla releases:
* Lightweight Transactions (LWT) #1359. Updates from Scylla 3.2:
LWT performance optimization: lightweight transactions query phase was optimized to reduce the number of round trips.
LWT safety: allow commitlog to wait for specific entries to be flushed to disk
You can learn more on LWT in Scylla and LWT optimizations from the latest LWT Webinar (registration required)
* CDC. Updates from Scylla 3.2:
Better support for schema changes
Support for rolling upgrade
* Scylla Alternator: The Open Source DynamoDB-compatible API. Updates from Scylla 3.2:
Correct support for all operators for the “Expected” parameter (previously some were unimplemented, some cases had bugs).
The DescribeTable operations now returns the table’s schema.
Produce clear errors on unimplemented features (previously, some of them were silently ignored).
Regards
Tzach