Intro and Overview

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Hello, my name is Guy, and I’m a Product Lead with ScyllaDB. Welcome to the ScyllaDB Essentials course. This course covers the basics of ScyllaDB and how to use it. It’s the foundation for more advanced courses.

ScyllaDB is a Big Data, NoSQL Real-time database. It’s used by some leading Fortune 500 companies for their most demanding applications. In this course, we’ll start with the background – we’ll talk about the difference between NoSQL databases and traditional ones, and we’ll see where ScyllaDB fits into the NoSQL family. We’ll also understand how you can create a cost-effective awesome performance experience for your customers by using ScyllaDB.

This course is designed for DBAs, Application Managers, and Architects who would like to better understand the core concepts of ScyllaDB and the way that it works. The course assumes some prior database experience. However, courses for those without any prior experience and also some more advanced courses are being developed.

By the end of this course, you will gain knowledge about how to use ScyllaDB, the ScyllaDB architecture, the data model, and also, of course, how to install ScyllaDB.

As ScyllaDB is a fully compatible drop-in replacement for Apache Cassandra, we’ll reference Apache Cassandra’s commands and methods throughout this course. However, as opposed to Apache Cassandra, which is written in Java, ScyllaDB is implemented in C++.

This fact, along with some other design decisions such as using a thread per core, allows ScyllaDB to offer ten times higher throughput, up to 1 million read/write operations per node, along with low and consistent latency. We’ll explain these terms later on in the course so you can understand how ScyllaDB operates at a fundamental level and achieves this great performance. Additional features like Auto-Tuning makes ScyllaDB easy to use and maintain. It requires minimal configuration and provides enhanced performance right out of the box, as we’ll see in the next lessons. After this introduction, we’ll dive right in. We’ll see how easy it is to install and to run ScyllaDB and also to run some basic database queries. In this part, you’ll get a chance to run it yourself using some hands-on practical examples.

The next lesson talks about the ScyllaDB data model. There we’ll talk about the data structure, Tables, Partitions, User-defined types, and Keyspaces. We’ll also see how the CQL Shell enables us to perform different database queries.

In the following lesson, we’ll talk about concepts like the Replication Factor and Consistency Level. We’ll see how ScyllaDB offers high availability while maintaining consistency. This lesson also includes two labs where you’ll have a chance to implement the theory.

The final lesson talks about ScyllaDB architecture. Here we’ll talk about the different database components how they interact, and we’ll understand terms like Compaction.

ScyllaDB is open-source software and has been licensed under the AGPL since day one. It’s backed by a vibrant, growing community of contributors. If you haven’t done so, please register for a user by clicking on the link that appears below this video. Also, you can join our slack channel by clicking on the link that appears below.

Thank you, and enjoy the rest of this course!