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Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

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Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#41

Post by senderista »

sitkack wrote: post #21
vosper wrote: post #5

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.

It is a fault tolerant massively scalable key value store capable of handling hundreds of terabytes of data. What are these options you are thinking of? The only thing that comes to my mind is Aerospike and possibly ScyllaDB.

If cloud is an option, DynamoDB?

Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#42

Post by tptacek »

sitkack wrote: post #21
vosper wrote: post #5

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.

It is a fault tolerant massively scalable key value store capable of handling hundreds of terabytes of data. What are these options you are thinking of? The only thing that comes to my mind is Aerospike and possibly ScyllaDB.

FoundationDB seems like the obvious example? But they're not strictly comparable in anything but scale, right? FDB is ACID.

Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#43

Post by binary132 »

macintux wrote: post #35
binary132 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if some of these issues could be addressed sanely in an extension to the functionality

We were working on ways of making it easier (such as CRDTs to reduce the amount of work developers had to do to leverage eventual consistency), but these were pretty challenging problems to solve. One of our biggest disappointments: we had plans to add a way to enforce strong consistency leveraging (IIRC) something akin to multi-paxos, but couldn't get it to work.

that sounds like a painful session

Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#44

Post by wbl »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #16
macintux wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thing is, Cassandra became and remained popular, with similar aspects (though in JVM instead of Erlang, so). Though it had a couple years head start when there really no other options for people wanting that kind of kit.

I feel building a threat intelligence product on Cassandra is a bit on the nose. What's next, calling the TCB Palladium?

Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#46

Post by nicholas-adams »

vosper wrote: post #5

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.

I think that in the time since 2011, things have changed more than a bit. As my employer provides Enterprise Grade Riak Support (and, of course, OpenRiak support), I'm under NDA and cannot really share names. However, I can share that that there are quite a few places that use Riak.

Here are a few off the top of my head:

- the biggest online betting company in the world

- one of Japan's largest e-commerce sites

- a large Hungarian bank

- one of China's largest electronic manufacturers

- arguably Asia's largest or second largest messaging platform

- a significant Indian online-documentation provider

- one of the largest US insurance providers

- an Australian app analytics provider

- a European telephone services provider

- one of the world's largest travel sites

- an Asian-based credit-card fraud detection service

- a number of start ups in various industries

- me - I do my crypto taxes using a 5 node Riak cluster running on Raspberry Pi's

In the Basho era (up to early 2017), Riak may have only been targetted to larger players but now, when it comes to areas such as in-house data sovereignty, compliance (e.g. GDPR), the flexibility, speed and reliability Riak now provides plus being free to run, people from individuals to corporates are starting to wake up and see the advantages.

(edited in an attempt to improve list formatting)

Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#47

Post by jtuple »

macintux wrote: post #35
binary132 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if some of these issues could be addressed sanely in an extension to the functionality

We were working on ways of making it easier (such as CRDTs to reduce the amount of work developers had to do to leverage eventual consistency), but these were pretty challenging problems to solve. One of our biggest disappointments: we had plans to add a way to enforce strong consistency leveraging (IIRC) something akin to multi-paxos, but couldn't get it to work.

TBH, we shipped fully working strong consistency in 2014. It just had a limited feature set, was disabled by default, and was never promoted/marketed since it didn't fit the direction the new CEO/CTO was pushing.

The engineering exodus around that time sorta killed the project though, and we never were able to do the big follow-up work to make it really shine.

(Disclaimer: Former Basho Principal Engineer, primary author of strong consistency work, lead riak_core dev from 2011-2015)

I think another 18 months would have been enough too. But it just wasn't the right environment after the hostile take-over / leadership transition.

Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#48

Post by macintux »

jtuple wrote: post #47
macintux wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were working on ways of making it easier (such as CRDTs to reduce the amount of work developers had to do to leverage eventual consistency), but these were pretty challenging problems to solve. One of our biggest disappointments: we had plans to add a way to enforce strong consistency leveraging (IIRC) something akin to multi-paxos, but couldn't get it to work.

TBH, we shipped fully working strong consistency in 2014. It just had a limited feature set, was disabled by default, and was never promoted/marketed since it didn't fit the direction the new CEO/CTO was pushing. The engineering exodus around that time sorta killed the project though, and we never were able to do the big follow-up work to make it really shine. (Disclaimer: Former Basho Principal Engineer, primary aut…

My apologies for misremembering. I’m glad you chimed in to correct the record.

Re: Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

#49

Post by remram »

jamesblonde wrote: post #30
masleeds wrote: post #20

Riak has been maintained through the post-basho years by engineers at some of its larger customers (disclaimer - including myself). 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. Evolut…

Metastability is an under-rated system property for databases and systems software, in general.

What does metastability mean in this context? I've only seen it used to mean "appears stable but not actually stable", eg systems that resist small perturbations but never return to nominal after bigger disturbance (like cold boot).

Did you mean "stability"?

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