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Database / ScyllaDB Interview questions

Explain the internal working of the Seastar future-promise model?

Seastar's concurrency model is built around futures (a placeholder for a value that will eventually be ready) and promises (the producer side that eventually fulfills that value), composed together instead of using blocking calls or OS-level thread synchronization.

sequenceDiagram participant App as Application code participant Reactor as Per-core reactor loop participant IO as Async I/O (disk/network) App->>Reactor: Issue async operation, get future Reactor->>IO: Submit non-blocking request App->>Reactor: Chain .then() continuation IO-->>Reactor: I/O completion event Reactor->>App: Resolve future, run continuation

Each core runs a single-threaded reactor loop that polls for completed I/O events and dispatches ready continuations, so nothing on that core ever blocks waiting for disk or network; instead, code chains .then() continuations onto a future, and the reactor invokes them once the underlying operation completes. Because everything on a given core runs cooperatively on one thread, there's no need for locks to protect that core's own data structures - the only synchronization required is for the deliberately explicit, asynchronous messages sent between cores. This is what allows ScyllaDB to scale near-linearly with core count without traditional multi-threaded contention.

What runs on each core to dispatch completed async operations?
Why don't a core's own data structures need locks under this model?

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What is ScyllaDB? What are the key features of ScyllaDB? What is the shard-per-core architecture in ScyllaDB? Define a partition key in ScyllaDB? What is a clustering key in ScyllaDB? What are the data types supported by ScyllaDB? Describe the Seastar framework used by ScyllaDB? What are the types of consistency levels in ScyllaDB? List the compaction strategies available in ScyllaDB? How do you create a table in ScyllaDB? What is a materialized view in ScyllaDB? Explain the purpose of the commit log in ScyllaDB? What is ScyllaDB Alternator? How do you apply TTL to data in ScyllaDB? What is ScyllaDB Manager? Why doesn't ScyllaDB rely on a JVM? How does ScyllaDB achieve linear scalability per node? What is the difference between ScyllaDB and Apache Cassandra? When should you use a local secondary index versus a global one? What happens when a wide partition forms in ScyllaDB? How is data replicated across nodes in ScyllaDB? Why should you avoid large batch statements in ScyllaDB? What is the difference between ScyllaDB and DynamoDB? How does ScyllaDB handle node failure with hinted handoff? When would you choose LOCAL_QUORUM over QUORUM? How can you optimize write performance in ScyllaDB? What is the difference between memtables and SSTables? Why do we use tombstones in ScyllaDB? How does ScyllaDB's shard-aware driver route requests? What is the difference between STCS and LCS compaction? When should you use lightweight transactions in ScyllaDB? How is repair implemented in ScyllaDB? Why doesn't ScyllaDB support arbitrary ad-hoc joins? What is the difference between ScyllaDB tablets and vnodes? How do you troubleshoot high read latency in ScyllaDB? Explain the internal working of the Seastar future-promise model? Explain the execution flow of a write request in ScyllaDB? Explain the lifecycle of an SSTable in ScyllaDB? How does ScyllaDB guarantee strongly consistent schema changes using Raft? What happens internally when ScyllaDB performs compaction? How can you optimize a multi-datacenter ScyllaDB deployment for latency? Which is better and why: LOCAL_QUORUM or ONE for a globally distributed app? How does token-aware routing improve latency in ScyllaDB? Why is the gossip protocol critical to ScyllaDB's cluster membership? How do you troubleshoot compaction backlog in ScyllaDB? Explain the internal working of ScyllaDB's read path? What happens when a node becomes unavailable in a ScyllaDB cluster? How does ScyllaDB implement Change Data Capture internally? Explain the execution flow of a lightweight transaction in ScyllaDB? How can you optimize schema design to avoid wide partitions at scale?
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