ScyllaDB Open Source Release 4.3

By Tzach Livyatan

January 18, 2021

The ScyllaDB team is pleased to announce the release of ScyllaDB Open Source 4.3, a production-ready release of our open source database.

ScyllaDB is an open source, NoSQL database with superior performance and consistently low latencies. Find the ScyllaDB Open Source 4.3 repository for your Linux distribution here. ScyllaDB 4.3 Docker is also available.

ScyllaDB 4.3 includes production ready Change Data Capture (CDC) as well as an experimental version of Alternator Streams – AWS DynamoDB Streams compatible API, Unified Installer, a first step toward removing the seed node concept, and many other improvements and bug fix (below).

Please note that only the last two minor releases of the ScyllaDB Open Source project are supported. Starting today, only ScyllaDB Open Source 4.3 and ScyllaDB 4.2 are supported, and ScyllaDB 4.1 is retired.

Deployment

Unified Installer is now available (see below)
ScyllaDB now have an official GCP Image (see below)
Support for direct upgrade from 2018 vintage releases was removed. One can still upgrade via intermediate versions (e.g. 2.3 → 3.0 → 3.1 → 3.3 → 4.0 → 4.1).

New features in ScyllaDB 4.3

Change Data Capture (CDC)

Change Data Capture (CDC) allows users to track data updates in their ScyllaDB database. While it is similar to the feature with the same name in Apache Cassandra and other databases, how it is implemented in ScyllaDB is unique, more accessible, and more powerful.

Originally introduced in ScyllaDB 4.1 as experimental, CDC is now graduating to a production ready feature.

With ScyllaDB’s CDC, you can choose to keep track of the updates, original values and/or new values. The data is stored in regular ScyllaDB tables (SSTables) and can be queried asynchronously using a standard ScyllaDB/Cassandra CQL driver. Data in a CDC table is set with a TTL, minimizing the possibility of an overflow.

Example: creating a table with CDC for delta and preimage:

CREATE TABLE base_table (
   pk text,
   ck text,
   val1 text,
   val2 text,
   PRIMARY KEY (pk, ck)
) WITH cdc = { 'enabled': 'true', 'preimage': 'true' };

CDC is also used internally to implement the Alternator Streams compatible with AWS DynamoDB Streams API (see below)

Updates from ScyllaDB 4.2:

The format of stream IDs: the lower 8 bytes were previously generated randomly, now some of them have semantics. In particular, the least significant byte contains a version (stream IDs might evolve with further releases).
Remove delta_mode::off. CDC information is not useful without at least delta==keys, since pre/post image data contains no info on what is actually done in base table operations. #7128

More information:

Changes in CDC from ScyllaDB 4.2

Improved the way pre-images and post-images for batches are generated. The commit includes a detailed description of the improvement. Fixes #6597, #6598
More information here
Add an “end-of-record” column. Adds an “eor” (end-of-record) column to cdc log. This is non-null only on last-in-timestamp group rows, i.e. end of a singular source “event”. A client can use this as a shortcut to knowing whether or not he has a full cdc “record” for a given source mutation (single row change). #7436
Add version number and grouping to stream id to allowing changing it in the future #6948
Ensure that CDC generation write is flushed to commitlog before ack #7619

Alternator Streams (Experimental)

Based on CDC, the following DynamoDB API stream operations are now supported in ScyllaDB:

DescribeStream
GetRecords
GetShardIterator
ListStreams

#5065

To enable Streams API with alternator, enable the experimental feature

Using --experimental-features=alternator-streams in the command line or by adding the following to scylla.yaml

experimental_features:
  - alternator-streams

Note that Alternator Streams differ in some respects from DynamoDB Streams:

The number of separate “shards” in Alternator’s streams is significantly larger than is typical on DynamoDB.
While in DynamoDB data usually appears in the stream less than a second after it was written, in Alternator Streams there is currently a 10 second delay by default. #6929
Some events are represented differently in Alternator Streams. For example, a single PutItem is represented by a REMOVE + MODIFY event, instead of just a single MODIFY or INSERT. #6930 #6918

More here

ScyllaDB Unified Installer

ScyllaDB is now available as an all-in-one binary tar file. You can download the tar file from the download page.

Unified Installer should be used when one does not have root privileges on the server.

For installation on an air-gap server, with no external access, it is recommended to download the standard packages, copy them to the air gap server and install using the standard package manager, more here. #6626 #6949

GCP Images

ScyllaDB is now available as a GCE image on Google Compute Platform (GCP) #7080 #6631

More on launching ScyllaDB Image for GCE here

Remove the seed concept in gossip

The concept of seed and the different behavior between seed nodes and non-seed nodes generate a lot of confusion, complication, and error for users. Starting from this release, seed nodes are ignored in the Gossip protocol. They are still in use (for now) as part of the init process. #6845

Security related updates

gnutls vulnerability: GNUTLS-SA-2020-09-04 #7212
New optional CQL ports (19042, 19142, see Shard aware CQL ports below)
Allow users to disable CQL unencrypted native transport by setting it to zero #6997

CQL Extensions

A new CQL protocol extension allows client drivers to distinguish between lightweight transactions (LWT) and non-LWT statements. The intent is to prefer the primary replica when sending LWT statements, to reduce transaction aborts due to contention.
More information
Shard aware CQL ports: new CQL port (19042 by default) is being open for the so-called “advanced shard-aware drivers”. It works exactly as the typical 9042 works for existing drivers (connector libraries), but it allows the client to choose the specific shard to connect to by precise binding of the client-side (ephemeral) port. Also, a TLS alternative is supported, under port 19142.
More information

Additional Features

Support for SSTable “md” format (CASSANDRA-14861) #4442
Docker: a new ‘--io-setup N‘ command line option, which users can pass to specify whether they want to run the “scylla_io_setup” script or not. This is useful if users want to specify I/O settings themselves in environments such as Kubernetes, where running “iotune” is problematic. #6587
Requests Role or User are now tracked in the tracing output #6737
Tracing improvements: better messages for single-key queries, and activities in the cache. The commits come with some examples.
REST API: Add long polling to StorageServiceRepairAsyncByKeyspaceGet #6445
Docker: ScyllaDB on Docker now supports the passing of extra arguments to scylla #7458

Tools

node_exporter is an agent used to report OS level metrics to ScyllaDB Monitoring Stack. In this release installed node_exporter is update from 0.17.0 to 1.0.1
Nodetool getendpoints can return wrongs nodes list #7134
The JMX management interface was enabled for Java 11 for Debian systems. It was already supported, but a packaging error resulting in installation problems.
nodetool now support the gettraceprobability command #7265

Performance Optimizations

Cleanup: nodetool cleanup procedure is used after adding nodes, to remove data that was migrated to the new nodes. The calculation that determines which sstables needed to be rewritten (cleaned up) was inefficient and could cause stalls in queries running at the same time, so it was optimized #6662
JSON: More of the code base was migrated from the jsoncpp library to the rjson library, improving JSON performance, JSON is heavily used in ScyllaDB Alternator.
MV: After a repair, bootstrap, or decommission (or a similar operation), the node receiving new data must update materialized views. This is done by reading staging sstables containing the new data, row by row, and updating the view rows corresponding to those rows. There can be large numbers of such sstables (one per vnode per peer), and reading from such large numbers of sstables requires a lot of memory. This memory usage is now dramatically reduced by exploiting the property that per-vnode sstables have few overlaps, and reusing the partitioned_sstable_set (which we use for leveled compaction strategy, which has similar properties) to avoid reading from all those sstables at once. #6707
Repair: moving from to btree_set for repair_hash eliminate the need for large allocation which cause stalls #6190
The ScyllaDB cache and memtable implementations now use a btree instead of a red-black tree. This improves performance in cache-intensive and write-intensive workloads. More here
utf8 validation of large cells causes latency spikes. In this release, UTF8 validation update to work on fragmented buffers to fix this. #7448

Configuration

The following new configuration parameters are available in this release:

max_concurrent_requests_per_shard: Maximum number of concurrent requests a single shard can handle before it starts shedding extra load. By default, no requests will be shed. Default: max (disabled)
native_shard_aware_transport_port_ssl: Like native_transport_port_ssl, but clients are forwarded to specific shards, based on the client-side port numbers. Default: 19142.
enable_sstables_md_format: Enable SSTables ‘md’ format to be used as the default file format (requires enable_sstables_mc_format). Default: true
max_memory_for_unlimited_query was replaced by two new parameters;
- max_memory_for_unlimited_query_soft_limit Maximum amount of memory a query, whose memory consumption is not naturally limited, is allowed to consume, e.g. non-paged and reverse queries. This is the soft limit, there will be a warning logged for queries violating this limit. Default: 1 MB
- max_memory_for_unlimited_query_hard_limit: Maximum amount of memory a query, whose memory consumption is not naturally limited, is allowed to consume, e.g. non-paged and reverse queries. This is the hard limit, queries violating this limit will be aborted. Default: 100 MB

#5870

schema_registry_grace_period: Time period in seconds after which unused schema versions will be evicted from the local schema registry cache. Default: 1 second
alternator_streams_time_window_s: CDC query confidence window for alternator streams. Default 10 second

Redis

The following commands have been added to ScyllaDB Redis API:

Build and Debugging

New documentation on ScyllaDB debugging
Toolchain: regenerate for gcc 10.2, As a side effect, this also brings in xxhash 0.7.4 #6813

Monitoring

For Metics updates from 4.2 to 4.3, see here

ScyllaDB 4.3 dashboard is available in the latest ScyllaDB Monitoring Stack release 3.5.3 or later.

Other bugs fix and updates in the release

CQL: Numbers of the ‘decimal’ type that had negative scale (which translates to positive exponent: 1.2e1 has negative scale, while 1.2e-1 has positive scale), when casted to a floating-point type (‘CAST x AS float‘), thew the node into a long loop, effectively making it unavailable. #6720
CQL: A bug where impossible range restrictions (WHERE a > 0 AND a < 0) was processed incorrectly #5799
Stability: Internal schema change CQL queries should not be used for distributed tables #6700
CQL: min()/max() return wrong results on some collections #6768
Stability: a rare memory leak caused by improper commitlog usage from hints manager #6776 #6409
Stability: Row-level repair was made more robust against hash collisions. Row-level repair uses a hash to identify mismatched rows. A weak hash is used to reduce computation and network costs, but this results in the possibility of collisions. Now, when a collision is detected, repair will copy the colliding rows (even if there was no problem) rather than fail the repair.
Stability: Repair now uses a uuid to identify repair jobs #6786
Stability: compaction should print a unique id to correlate start and finish log messages #6840
Alternator: tracing was fix for GetItem and BatchItem #6891
Stability: TWCS: compaction: partition estimate can become 0, causing an assert in sstables::prepare_summary() #6913
scyllatop: using `metricPattern` fails with “dictionary changed size during iteration” #7488
Stability: Cleanup compaction in KA/LA sstables may crash the node in some cases #7553
Stability: secondary index updates failing after upgrade to 4.2.0 due to missing system_schema.computed_columns. The problem is limited to secondary indexes created *before* ScyllaDB 3.2, which had their `idx_token` column incorrectly not marked as computed #7515
Stability: schema integrity issues that can arise in races involving materialized views may cause segmentation fault and coredump happened during starting after scylla was killed #7420
Stability: provide strong exception guarantees from load_sstable() #6658
Stability: Incrementally delete resharded sstables as they’re retired #7463
Stability: Node may get stuck in schema disagreement loop when bootstrapping sequentially #7396
CQL: token_restriction: invalid_request_exception on SELECTs with both normal and token restrictions #7441
lwt: store column_mapping’s for each table schema version upon a DDL change
Code refactoring: Move write() methods from class sstable to class sstable_writer #3012
Stability: Clean cluster issued ‘Exceptional future ignored‘ right after been started with no load on it #7352
UX: Make batchlog size warning clearer #7367
Stability: ascii validation of large cells causes large allocations #7393
Stability: ScyllaDB 4.1.7 crashing on repairs (uncaught exceptions) #7285
Stability: Shutting down database hangs in dtest-debug #7331
Stability: Useless linearization on large data during validation, of either type bytes or string-derived, potentially cause stalls due to reclaiming #7318
Stability: NEW_NODE should be sent after listening for CQL clients has started #7301
Stability (counters): runtime error: signed integer overflow cannot be represented in type ‘long int‘ #7330
Non root install (Logging): can’t find scylla log by journalctl --user -xe #7131
Non root install: nonroot install: ubuntu18 failed to start for `NOFILE rlimit too low` #7133
CQL (found with Jepsen): Aborted reads of writes which fail with “Not enough replicas available” #7258
Stability: Unsynchronized cross-shard memory operations caused by incorrectly used updateable_value #7310
Stability: Reduce unnecessary VIEW_BACKLOG updates in gossip #5970
Non root install: nonroot: systemctl –user enable scylla-server.service failed on Ubuntu 18 #7288
Non root install: Got offline mode warnings on nonroot mode #7286
CQL: (LOCAL_/EACH_)QUORUM consistency calculation is broken when RF=0 #6905
Install: scylla_prepare: ‘get_set_nic_and_disks_config_value‘ is not defined #7276
Stability: RPC server still has handlers registered in dtests involving repair-based operations #7262
Stability: Query pager can try to get keys from empty vector of result::partitions #7263
Install: scylla_cpuscaling_setup: Got warning when installing scylla-cpupower.service #7230
Stability: disable_autocompaction_nodetool_test failed: std::runtime_error (Too early: storage service not initialized yet) #7199
Stability: abstract_replication_strategy::do_get_ranges is passed a reference to token_metadata that may be invalidated if it yields #7044
Install: scylla_setup doesn’t support to skip install of hugepages or libhugetlbfs-bin package #7182
Stability: init – Startup failed: std::runtime_error (Could not find tokens for 10.0.0.155 to replace) during large-partition-4d test #7166
Init: scylla4 process fails to restart (perftune.py: error: argument --mode: invalid choice: 'None') #6847
CQL: Forbid adding new fields to UDTs used in partition key columns #6941
Stability: Make allocation_section decay the reserves over time #325 (from 2015!)
Init: scylla_setup failing with dependency errors #7153
CQL (found with Jepsen): Weird return values from batch updates #7113
Non root install: scylla-python3 isn’t loaded for setup scripts #7130
Stability: some non-prepared statements can leak memory (with set/map/tuple/udt literals) #7019
Stability: Reactor stall for 6 ms in sstables::seal_summary() #7108
Stability: coredump while node hit enospc: “Assertion `!this->_future && this->_state && !this->_task' failed #7085
Stability: gossip: Apply state for local node in shadow round #7073
Stability (CDC): CDC: within a batch, partition deletes and range deletes do not affect postimage #6900
CDC: cdc delta == keys does not produce cdc$operation nor cdc$ttl #7095
Stability: Hinted handoff is using very long timeout to sending some hints #7051
Build: dist: scylla-python3 should be separated repository #6751
Stability: Track repair_meta created on both repair follower and master #7009
Stability: Failed compaction : compaction_manager – compaction failed: sstables::malformed_sstable_exception (consumer not at partition boundary) #6529
Stability: sstable code needs to close files in error paths #6448
Stability: ScyllaDB setup failed: unit mdmonitor.service is not found or invalid #7000
UX: scylla_setup: include swap size in the prompt #6947
Untyped result sets may cause segfaults when parsing disengaged optionals #6915
UX: scylla_setup: default “done” when there is no disk to choose from #6760
Stability: Startup failed: std::runtime_error ({shard 0: fmt::v6::format_error (invalid type specifier), shard 1: fmt::v6::format_error (invalid type specifier)})']) due to an adjusted in format strings in log messages after changing string format library #6874
Setup: scylla_setup does not abort RAID setup when no free disk available #6860
CQL: Filtering captures uninitialized/deleted values of certain types #6295
Stability: repair: Relax node selection in bootstrap when nodes are less than RF #6744
UX: scylla_prepare: Improve error message on missing CPU features #6528
CQL: NULL counters treated as 0 #6382
CQL: IN(NULL) yields different results with prepared statements #6369
CQL: LIKE filter ignored on column key #6371
CQL: NULL and empty text are considered equal #6372
Stability: scylla_coredump_setup always fails on CentOS 7 #6789
Setup: node_exporter_install --force failing #6782
repair: inaccurate log from check_failed_ranges #6785
repair: log recoverable errors as warnings rather than info messages #5612
scylla setup fails on Oracle Linux Artifact: OS variant not recognized #6761
scylla_util.py: duplication on detecting distribution #6691
scylla_setup: on RAID prompt, strange output when passing comma separated multiple disks #6724
Stability: connection storm when attempting to achieve shard-per-connection #5239
Stability: Nodetool Repair failing on keyspace with std::runtime_error (row_diff.size() != set_diff.size()) #6252
Stability: some non-prepared statements can leak memory (with set/map/tuple/udt literals) #7019
ScyllaDB_setup: scylla_setup failed to setup RAID when called without --raiddev argument #7627
ScyllaDB_setup: scylla_raid_setup: use sysfs to detect existing RAID volume, which may not be able to detect existing RAID volume by device file existence. #7383
Stability: “rare race condition in compaction_writer destructor may cause Segmentation fault during scylla stop, for example with CDC traffic #7821

12 Jan 2021

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