11–20 of 76 posts
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
Who would this be for in 2024? I remember evaluating Riak back in 2011 or so for an analytics solution, but ended up going with a more traditional OLAP database that was a much better option. It's hard for me to imagine where Riak would be a good option given how many choices we have today for various data stores.
Riak isn’t remotely like OLAP. What was your use case?
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
Riak is horribly unfriendly as a database: no SQL, it exposes eventual consistency directly to the developer, it’s relatively slow, and Erlang is a fairly unusual language.
While you can run Riak on a single server, you’d have to really want to.
Its strength is the ability to scale massively, but not many projects need that scale, and by the time you do, you’re probably already using some friendlier database and you’d rather make that one work.
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
Speaking as a former tech evangelist/engineer at Basho, there were a few significant challenges. Riak is horribly unfriendly as a database: no SQL, it exposes eventual consistency directly to the developer, it’s relatively slow, and Erlang is a fairly unusual language. While you can run Riak on a single server, you’d have to really want to. Its strength is the ability to scale massively, but not many projects need th…
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
Speaking as a former tech evangelist/engineer at Basho, there were a few significant challenges. Riak is horribly unfriendly as a database: no SQL, it exposes eventual consistency directly to the developer, it’s relatively slow, and Erlang is a fairly unusual language. While you can run Riak on a single server, you’d have to really want to. Its strength is the ability to scale massively, but not many projects need th…
Though it had a couple years head start when there really no other options for people wanting that kind of kit.
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
Our code was in Clojure, and we just wrapped the Java client. The conflict resolution was a steep learning curve, but overall, it was kind of nice (coming from Mongo).
But man, Clojure stack traces wrapping Java stack traces wrapping Erlang stack traces in a Kafka consumer... I wish that hell on no one.
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
Speaking as a former tech evangelist/engineer at Basho, there were a few significant challenges. Riak is horribly unfriendly as a database: no SQL, it exposes eventual consistency directly to the developer, it’s relatively slow, and Erlang is a fairly unusual language. While you can run Riak on a single server, you’d have to really want to. Its strength is the ability to scale massively, but not many projects need th…
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
The focus has been on trying to improve the stability of the database when subject to complex failure scenarios under stressful load, with minimal need for urgent operator intervention. The focus has been on keeping those existing operators happy rather than seeking out new users. Evolution of the product since basho has been slow but significant.
The project now has support from Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, and we're looking to invest some effort over the next few months explaining what we've done, and to start to articulate what we see as the future for Riak. So if you're interested watch this space.
It is expected to remain a niche product though. However, it may still find a home for those demanding specific non-functional requirements, with an acceptance of some functional constraints.