Our Top NoSQL Blogs of the Year: Rust, Raft, MongoDB, Books & Tablets

As 2023 draws to a close, let’s take a moment to look back at our top 10 NoSQL blogs written this year – plus 10 “timeless classics” that continue to attract attention.Before we start, a heartfelt thanks to the many community members who contributed to our blogs in various ways – from customers sharing best practices at ScyllaDB Summit, to open source contributors and ScyllaDB engineers explaining how they raised the bar on what’s possible for NoSQL performance, to anyone who has initiated or contributed to the discussion on Hacker News, Reddit, and other platforms.Drumroll, please! Here are the most-read NoSQL blogs that we published in 2023:Introducing “Database Performance at Scale”: A Free, Open Source BookBy Dor LaorIntroducing a new book that provides practical guidance for understanding the opportunities, trade-offs, and traps you might encounter while trying to optimize data-intensive applications for high throughput and low latency.Why ScyllaDB is Moving to a New Replication Algorithm: TabletsBy Tomasz GrabiecHow moving from Vnode-based replication to tablets helps dynamically distribute data across the cluster, ultimately increasing ScyllaDB’s elasticity.Top Mistakes with ScyllaDB: StorageBy Felipe Cardeneti MendesAll about disk types, best practices, common misconceptions, filesystem types, RAID setups, tunable parameters, and what makes disks so special in the context of databases.When to Use ScyllaDB vs MongoDB: Lessons Learned From 5+ Years in ProductionBy Cynthia DunlopNumberly has been using both ScyllaDB and MongoDB in production for 5+ years. Learn which NoSQL database they rely on for different use cases and why.Benchmarking MongoDB vs ScyllaDB: Performance, Scalability & CostBy Dr. Daniel SeyboldDr. Daniel Seybold shares how MongoDB and ScyllaDB compare on throughput, latency, scalability, and price-performance in this third-party benchmark by benchANT.How Numberly Replaced Kafka with a Rust-Based ScyllaDB Shard-Aware ApplicationBy Alexys JacobHow Numberly used Rust & ScyllaDB to replace Kafka, streamlining the way all its AdTech components send and track messages (whatever their form).ScyllaDB Open Source 5.2: With Raft-Based Schema ManagementBy Tzach LivyatanScyllaDB 5.2 introduces Raft-based strongly consistent schema management, DynamoDB Alternator TTL, and many more improvements and bug fixes.5 Intriguing ScyllaDB Capabilities You Might Have OverlookedBy Felipe Cardeneti MendesA look at 5 “hidden gem” ScyllaDB capabilities that help ScyllaDB power users: workload prioritization, heat-weighted load balancing, per shard concurrency limit, per partition rate limit, and bypass cache.MongoDB vs Postgres vs ScyllaDB: Tractian’s Benchmarking and MigrationBy João Pedro Voltani and João GranzottiTRACTIAN shares their comparison of ScyllaDB vs MongoDB and PostgreSQL, then provides an overview of their MongoDB to ScyllaDB migration process, challenges & results.Rust in the Real World: Super Fast Data Ingestion Using ScyllaDBBy Javier RamosA walk through of a real-world use case where 1) You have hierarchical or graph data stored in an S3 data lake, 2) You need to ingest it with high throughput and speed into ScyllaDB, and 3) You need to traverse or search the graph very fast.Bonus: Top NoSQL Database Blogs From Years PastMany of the blogs published in previous years continued to resonate with the community. Here’s a rundown of 10 enduring favorites:Benchmarking Apache Cassandra (40 Nodes) vs ScyllaDB (4 Nodes) (Juliusz Stasiewicz, Piotr Grabowski, and Karol Baryla) – We benchmarked Apache Cassandra on 40 nodes vs ScyllaDB on just 4 nodes. See how they stacked up on throughput, latency, and cost. (2022)The Taming of the B-Trees  (Pavel “Xemul” Emelyanov) – Discover how and why ScyllaDB engineers implemented B-tree and B+-tree data structures in their NoSQL distributed database. We share the practical details you won’t read in books. (2021)Using Spring Boot, ScyllaDB and Time Series Data  (Lubos Kosco) – Learn how to use Spring Boot apps with ScyllaDB for time series data, taking advantage of shard-aware drivers and prepared statements. (2021)NoSQL vs. NewSQL: CockroachDB vs. ScyllaDB  (Ivan Prisyazhynyy) – NewSQL and NoSQL are both designs for distributed databases that go beyond the capabilities of a traditional RDBMS. But how are they similar and how do they differ? See this apples-and-oranges comparison of CockroachDB to ScyllaDB. (2021)