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ScyllaDB, the wide-column database used by Comcast, Samsung, and banking giant Santander, has released a new database service it claims improves scalability and lowers cost.

The company also recently reviewed its licensing terms to move away from the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) – ScyllaDB 6.2 is the final version under that license – to a source-available license to address the “constant challenge for vendors whose core product is open source,” according to the company’s CEO.

ScyllaDB launched its first DBaaS in 2019 based on vnode data replication as used by Cassandra, another wide-column database similarly used for low-latency, globally distributed applications. The new service, dubbed ScyllaDB X, uses Raft – a consensus algorithm for distributed systems – to introduce a new tablets architecture.

“Tablets are designed to support flexible and dynamic data distribution across the cluster,” CTO Avi Kivity said in a blog post. “Based on Raft, this new approach provides new levels of elasticity with near-instant bootstrap and the ability to add new nodes in parallel – even doubling an entire cluster at once.”

“Since new nodes begin serving requests as soon as they join the cluster, users can spin up new nodes that start serving requests almost instantly. This means teams can quickly scale out in response to traffic spikes – satisfying latency SLAs without needing to overprovision ‘just in case.'”

ScyllaDB claims the new system will scale from 100,000 OPS to 2 million in minutes with steady single-digit millisecond latency while also reducing costs against comparable systems.

Announcing licensing changes in January, the company said its first source-available product would be ScyllaDB Enterprise 2025.1, released in April.

Dor Laor, co-founder and CEO, said at the time that while the team had contributed to dozens of open source projects including drivers, a Kubernetes operator, test harnesses, and various tools, it was difficult to maintain two code bases for its main product.

“For almost a decade, we have been maintaining two separate release streams: one for the open source database and one for the enterprise product. Balancing the free vs paid offerings is a never-ending challenge that involves engineering, product, marketing, and constant sales discussions,” he said.

ScyllaDB claims that the unpredictable and sluggish performance of its rival, Apache Cassandra, is prompting users to migrate to its system. Whether that holds true, it will have to overcome the intransigence of Cassandra’s market penetration if it is to progress.

Like ScyllaDB, Cassandra is designed to support highly distributed systems where writes exceed reads, and so-called ACID compliance is not important. Netflix, for example, has been using Cassandra since 2013, replacing Oracle databases and using the NoSQL system to support global accounts and customer data worldwide. Apple is another flagship Cassandra user.

In February, IBM bought DataStax, the AI and data biz that supports and contributes to Cassandra, which remains an Apache project.

At the time, Big Blue said it intended DataStax to continue to work with the open source Apache Cassandra, Langflow, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch communities in which DataStax participates.

IBM planned for the DataStax Cassandra database service, AstraDB, to improve the existing vector capabilities of IBM watsonx.data, IBM’s data lake for AI and analytics. It also sees Langflow, the open source visual framework for building AI applications, adding middleware capabilities to IBM watsonx.ai, as its AI development studio. ®