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There are a lot of open source databases out there, and ScyllaDB, a NoSQL variety, is looking to differentiate itself by attracting none other than Amazon users. Today, it announced a DynamoDB migration tool to help Amazon customers move to its product.

It’s a bold move, but Scylla, which has a free open source product along with paid versions, has always had a penchant for going after bigger players. It has had a tool to help move Cassandra users to ScyllaDB for some time.

CEO Dor Laor says DynamoDB customers can now also migrate existing code with little modification. “If you’re using DynamoDB today, you will still be using the same drivers and the same client code. In fact, you don’t need to modify your client code one bit. You just need to redirect access to a different IP address running Scylla,” Laor told TechCrunch.

He says that the reason customers would want to switch to Scylla is because it offers a faster and cheaper experience by utilizing the hardware more efficiently. That means companies can run the same workloads on fewer machines, and do it faster, which ultimately should translate to lower costs.

The company also announced a $25 million Series C extension led by Eight Roads Ventures. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Magma Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and TLV Partners also participated. Scylla has raised a total of $60 million, according to the company.

The startup has been around for 6 years and customers include Comcast, GE, IBM and Samsung. Laor says that Comcast went from running Cassandra on 400 machines to running the same workloads with Scylla on just 60.

Laor is playing the long game in the database market, and it’s not about taking on Cassandra, DynamoDB or any other individual product. “Our main goal is to be the default NoSQL database where if someone has big data, real-time workloads, they’ll think about us first, and we will become the default.”

AWS announced a new time series database today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The new product called DynamoDB On-Demand is a fully managed database designed to track items over time, which can be particularly useful for Internet of Things scenarios.

“With time series data each data point consists of a timestamp and one or more attributes and it really measures how things change over time and helps drive real time decisions,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained.

He sees a problem though with existing open source and commercial solutions, which says don’t scale well and hard to manage. This is of course a problem that a cloud service like AWS often helps solve.

Not surprising as customers were looking for a good time series database solution, AWS decided to create one themselves. “Today we are introducing Amazon DynamoDB on-demand, a flexible new billing option for DynamoDB capable of serving thousands of requests per second without capacity planning,” Danilo Poccia from AWS wrote in the blog post introducing the new service.

Jassy said that they built DynamoDB on-demand from the ground up with an architecture that organizes data by time intervals and enables time series specific data compression, which leads to less scanning and faster performance.

He claims it will be a thousand times faster at a tenth of cost, and of course it scales up and down as required and includes all of the analytics capabilities you need to understand all of the data you are tracking.

This new service is available across the world starting today.

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Beyond the MongoDB content that will be at Percona Live Europe 2018, there is also a bit of an agenda for MongoDB Europe 2018, happening on November 8 in London—a day after Percona Live in Frankfurt. I expect you’ll see a diverse set of MongoDB content at Percona Live.

The Percona Live Europe Call for Papers closes TODAY! (Friday August 17, 2018)

From Amazon, there have been some good MySQL changes. You now have access to time delayed replication as a strategy for your High Availability and disaster recovery. This works with versions 5.7.22, 5.6.40 and later. It is worth noting that this isn’t documented as working for MariaDB (yet?). It arrived in MariaDB Server in 10.2.3.

Another MySQL change from Amazon? Aurora Serverless MySQL is now generally available. You can build and run applications without thinking about instances: previously, the database function was not all that focused on serverless. This on-demand auto-scaling serverless Aurora should be fun to use. Only Aurora MySQL 5.6 is supported at the moment and also, be aware that this is not available in all regions yet (e.g. Singapore).

Releases

• pgmetrics is described as an open-source, zero-dependency, single-binary tool that can collect a lot of information and statistics from a running PostgreSQL server and display it in easy-to-read text format or export it as JSON for scripting.
• PostgreSQL 10.5, 9.6.10, 9.5.14, 9.4.19, 9.3.24, And 11 Beta 3 has two fixed security vulnerabilities may inspire an upgrade.

Link List

• Google SRE book – An excellent summary by Dan Luu, of the book that was covered in Week 46. I’ll be on the lookout for more of these summaries!
• How Amazon DynamoDB adaptive capacity accommodates uneven data access patterns (or, why what you know about DynamoDB might be outdated) – an excellent blog about DynamoDB and how it adaptively adjusts throughput in response to your traffic at a per-shard/partition level for all tables. It is more elastic and works well for uneven workloads. For all capacity planners using DynamoDB, I think this is a great post for you to read.

Industry Updates

• Martin Arrieta (LinkedIn) is now a Site Reliability Engineer at Fastly. Formerly of Pythian and Percona.
• Ivan Zoratti (LinkedIn) is now Director of Product Management at Neo4j. He was previously on founding teams, was the CTO of MariaDB Corporation (then SkySQL), and is a long time MySQL veteran.

Upcoming Appearances

• db tech showcase Tokyo 2018 – 19-21 September 2018
• Open Source Summit Europe 2018 – 22-24 October 2018

Feedback

I look forward to feedback/tips via e-mail at colin.charles@percona.com or on Twitter @bytebot.

The post This Week in Data with Colin Charles 49: MongoDB Conference Opportunities and Serverless Aurora MySQL appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

One of the joys of cloud computing is handing over your data to the cloud vendor and letting them handle the heavy lifting. Up until now that has meant they updated the software or scaled the hardware for you. Today, AWS took that to another level when it announced Amazon DynamoDB Continuous Backups and Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR).

With this new service, the company lets you simply enable the new backup tool, and the backup happens automatically. Amazon takes care of the rest, providing a continuous backup of all the data in your DynamoDB database.

But it doesn’t stop there, it lets the backup system act as a recording of sorts. You can rewind your data set to any point in time in the backup to any time with “per second granularity” up to 35 days in the past. What’s more, you can access the tool from the AWS Management Console, an API call or via the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

Screenshot: Amazon

“We built this feature to protect against accidental writes or deletes. If a developer runs a script against production instead of staging or if someone fat-fingers a DeleteItem call, PITR has you covered. We also built it for the scenarios you can’t normally predict,” Amazon’s Randall Hunt wrote in the blog post announcing the new feature.

If you’re concerned about the 35 day limit, you needn’t be as the system is an adjunct to your regular on-demand backups, which you can keep for as long as you need.

Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, who introduced the new service at the Amazon Summit in San Francisco today, said it doesn’t matter how much data you have. Even with a terabyte of data, you can make use of this service. “This is a truly powerful mechanism here,” Vogels said.

The new service is available in various regions today. You can learn about regional availability and pricing options here.