Database Renaissance Man

DataStax’s softly spoken co-founder Jonathan Ellis has  successfully made the transition from the cubicle to the  corner office.  Mayank Sharma grills him on databases.

- Mayank Sharma

The Cassandra project doesn’t have a Benevolent Dictator For Life, but if it did that title would surely go to Jonathan Ellis. The co-founder of DataStax, Jonathan has been involved with Cassandra since the time it was open-sourced by Facebook. Once the project graduated from the incubator at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), he served as its first Project Chair for the next six years. It was difficult to tear Jonathan from his fans at DataStax’s Accelerate conference in Washington, but Mayank Sharma lured him by disguising himself as one as well.

Linux Format: You’ve always been a database guy… How did you find your way to Apache Cassandra?

Jonathan Ellis: It’s true that I’ve always been interested in database technology, but I initially thought that the database space was just making incremental improvements on well-understood solutions until I joined a cloud backup company called Mozy in 2005. I built an object store there that scaled to petabytes of data and gigabits per second of throughput, and one of its features was single-instance storage. That is, no matter how many users uploaded the same video or the same binary, we’d only store one copy in the backup storage.

This in turn meant that we needed a way to track which users had copies of which files – scaling to millions of users and billions of files. That’s when I realised that we needed new database architectures to deal with the challenges of web and mobile applications. Existing databases were optimised for applications that dealt with a single company’s worth of users, but now we needed to scale to an entire country. It was a very different problem that required different trade-offs.