11–20 of 27 posts
For those, like me, who do not know what Riak is: "Riak is an open source, highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed database." Source: http://basho.com/products/riak-overview/
It's a distributed multi-node key-value store. They built it using Erlang (I almost consider that, alone, a "feature").
I really liked the introduction of Snappy to CouchDB, especially for EC2 machines with their usually slow IO
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also makes different trade-offs in usability of the software. It is (in my opinion) the most sysadmin friendly datastore, without hiding complexity, the tools are just pleasant to use. However, it has a larger curve for developers. We did a shootout to find a solution that would work for our needs and it came down to Mongo vs. Riak. We went with Mongo and are feeling the pain of getting everything automated and se…
Having worked with some quite large Mongo setups, I think you'll find the administration of Mongo ends up being significantly more than a single upfront cost. Dealing with sharding + replica sets is an administrative nightmare with Mongo.
Getting client apps configured properly is the hardest part of replica set use. It's only a one time problem though.
It is kind of a shame though. Riak has awesome features, but some of them (e.g. secondary indexes) are hard to use and documentation is somewhat missing.
If you look at the official clients page (http://wiki.basho.com/Client-Libraries.html#Ruby), you can see ripple (https://github.com/seancribbs/ripple) but the page doesn't mention riak-ruby-client (https://github.com/basho/riak-ruby-client) which was split from ripple some time ago.
In theory, both of them support secondary indexes as far as I can tell, but you won't find that feature in either readme. There are some specs available that somehow describe parts of it though. I still don't see clearly how I could search secondary indexes from either library.
The same goes for things like data vs raw_data and serializers (small discussion: https://github.com/basho/riak-ruby-client/pull/19). While there is a very informative screencast in Seans blog, there is no mention in the readme file.
I love to go back to Riak every now and then and throw one of the bigger datasets I have sitting around at a single node using Ruby. It is one of the most interesting databases out there and it's a breeze to set up (especially when compared to Cassandra). It is kind of a shame though. Riak has awesome features, but some of them (e.g. secondary indexes) are hard to use and documentation is somewhat missing. If you loo…
For those, like me, who do not know what Riak is: "Riak is an open source, highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed database." Source: http://basho.com/products/riak-overview/
It's a distributed multi-node key-value store. They built it using Erlang (I almost consider that, alone, a "feature").
Well, that's the filter I use when looking at anything. If its not written in erlang I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how it isn't really actually a distributed system. Usually I find out that it isn't.
It is really impressive how far Riak has come in the last year.
I don't think anything compares to it, and I think it should have an order of magnitude more interest and users. (I think people just get scared off by "erlang", which is silly.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based off Amazon's Dynamo work (think S3).
There's little relationship between Dynamo and S3. Riak is based on the former but not the latter.
(Also, if you like S3, keep your eyes on Basho over the next few weeks).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a distributed multi-node key-value store. They built it using Erlang (I almost consider that, alone, a "feature").
If it claims to be distributed and its not written in erlang, don't use it. Well, that's the filter I use when looking at anything. If its not written in erlang I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how it isn't really actually a distributed system. Usually I find out that it isn't.
If something says it is parallel this, or concurrent that, that is when I filter it - thus far Erlang's concurrency model has been unmatched (in my limited experience) by any other language I've used for efficacy and simplicity.
I love to go back to Riak every now and then and throw one of the bigger datasets I have sitting around at a single node using Ruby. It is one of the most interesting databases out there and it's a breeze to set up (especially when compared to Cassandra). It is kind of a shame though. Riak has awesome features, but some of them (e.g. secondary indexes) are hard to use and documentation is somewhat missing. If you loo…