Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP of ScyllaDB in Action. A few years back, I was preparing to start a job where I knew I would be working with ScyllaDB. I went hunting for resources to learn before my first day, but information was few and far between. For better or for worse, I read a lot about Apache Cassandra and pretended that every time they said “Cassandra”, they were really saying “ScyllaDB”. As I’ve worked with the database, I’ve evolved my knowledge, and I hope that my pathfinding will be your well-laid trail to learning about ScyllaDB.

Accordingly, I’ve focused this book on teaching the database from the basics. To get the best out of it, you’ll want to have some basic familiarity with SQL. You’ve probably written a SELECT statement before, and that knowledge will assist you throughout the book as you learn about Scylla. If you’re a database expert, that’s okay too! You’ll get to break some habits and pick up some new ones to effectively use ScyllaDB. You should also have some familiarity with a programming language – preferably Python, as you’ll use it to build a small sample application to learn about the database driver and its client-side features.