I came across ScyllaDB while I was researching how to store tick data for backtesting.

Tick data refers to any market data which shows the price and volume of every print. Additionally tick data often includes information about every change to the best bid and ask. The most common alternative to tick data is candlestick data. Although the charts may be drawn different ways, it is common to compress tick data by grouping the ticks into candlesticks. This compressed data is more commonly available than tick data because it requires significantly less memory, bandwidth, disk space, etc. In addition to the computer hardware involved, most people can only take in a limited amount of tick data at one time.

Conventionally, traders might use relational database like MySQL and PostgreSQL to get the job done. I believe there might be a better alternative to deal with Time Series data, for instance, OpenTSDB and Apache Cassandra.

I have a similar post about using VirtualBox as a remote PostgreSQL server. In this post, however, we are going to explore the setup of the C++ cousin of Apache Cassandra - ScyllaDB on VirtualBox guest Debian. The official documentation of ScyllaDB has a test-drive on VirtualBox. However, they have only mentioned the setup for RHEL and CentOS for some reason. I hope this tutorial will serve as a complimentary doc for that purpose.

VB Guest Debian Installation ( netinst )

Download Debian netinst cd.

The installation is pretty straightforward. There is only one personal preference I would like to make - Deselect all extra packages. After all, this is just a remote server, we don’t need GUI or anything extra fancy.

Deselect all extra software

After installation, make sure you have sudo ready.

su apt install -y sudo adduser YOUR_USER_NAME sudo reboot

Network

Comparing with the tutorial for PostgreSQL on VirtualBox, we will use NAT instead of Bridge network this time.

Define forwarding ports in the NAT configuration in VirtualBox network settings: Check your network settings and define port forwarding as described below: Machine → Settings → Network → Port Forwarding

Check VirtualBox network settings

Set the forwarding ports for Scylla: 9042, 7000, 7001, 9180 and 7199

Set forwarding rules

Install ScyllaDB

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https wget gnupg2 dirmngr sudo apt-get update

Set Keys

sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/scylladb:/scylla-3rdparty-stretch/Debian_9.0/Release.key sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 17723034C56D4B19

Add the Scylla APT repository

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/scylla.list http://repositories.scylladb.com/scylla/repo/546ab40d-5c6e-4085-ac94-deafdce9ca87/debian/scylladb-3.0-stretch.list

Install ScyllaDB

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install scylla

Configuration

Configure the /etc/scylla/scylla.yaml file with the following parameters:

... cluster_name: 'VirtualBox ScyllaDB Cluster' ... listen_address: 10.0.2.15 ... rpc_address: 10.0.2.15 ... - seeds: "10.0.2.15" ...

Start ScyllaDB

sudo scylla_io_setup sudo systemctl start scylla-server.service

Connect to ScyllaDB via cqlsh

cqlsh 10.0.2.15

I hope you have enjoyed this short tutorial.

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