My Year of Riak
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My Year of Riak
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: My Year of Riak
#2I'd love to use riak for all the reasons mentioned in this article, and more.
The single missing 'feature' (design decision) that I can't live without, is that you can't efficiently do range queries/order-by on the key in riak today.
Hopefully this will get easier with secondary indexes / riak-search integration. Not clear yet.
Re: My Year of Riak
#3The killer feature I'm looking for is Riak's "it just works" -- especially in the case of nodes failing, soft failing, going offline, timing out, whatever.
In my situation, I don't care about the performance at all, because I don't have many keys at any given moment. The few that I have matter greatly.
I care that when I store a key, it's reliably, durably, stored and replicated, and that when nodes fail I don't have to do anything special to keep running. (This is in contrast to PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Mongo replication, where you have to fail over, then switch back eventually, and it takes special effort.)
AFAICT, It's not provided by Redis or CouchDB either, because their replication is async -- keys can get lost.
Having looked at a bunch of options in the last couple weeks, it seems like only Riak and Cassandra truly offer durable, synced replication that isn't difficult to admin. (...and of the two of them, Riak's documentation gives much more confidence about the ongoing admin efforts.)
Has anyone used any solid options I've perhaps overlooked?
Re: My Year of Riak
#4Definitely agree on the expense of a list-keys operation, be sure to avoid at all costs.
Some of the Riak documentation was incomplete/incorrect which made implementation a little sticky, but the mailing list is extremely responsive and helpful.
Otherwise, have had a great experience with Riak thus far. Looking forward to the ease of scaling as well!
Re: My Year of Riak
#5I'd love to use riak for all the reasons mentioned in this article, and more. The single missing 'feature' (design decision) that I can't live without, is that you can't efficiently do range queries/order-by on the key in riak today. Hopefully this will get easier with secondary indexes / riak-search integration. Not clear yet.
It's so important to evaluate whether you need range queries before picking a tech like Riak.
They are coming, though. That's what I hear, at least.
Re: My Year of Riak
#6I'd love to use riak for all the reasons mentioned in this article, and more. The single missing 'feature' (design decision) that I can't live without, is that you can't efficiently do range queries/order-by on the key in riak today. Hopefully this will get easier with secondary indexes / riak-search integration. Not clear yet.
It's so important to evaluate whether you need range queries before picking a tech like Riak. They are coming, though. That's what I hear, at least.
If we are talking about performing range queries on an index then Riak already has it in the form of Riak Search. In 1.0 this is also supported by secondary indices.
If we are talking about performing a range operation on the primary key which returns the matching objects, then no, Riak doesn't currently offer that. However, given it's support for an ordered data store such as leveldb in 1.0 it should only be a matter of time before that is possible.
Just to try it out I already implemented this for fun on my fork.
https://github.com/rzezeski/riak_kv/tree/native-range
https://github.com/rzezeski/riak-erlang-client/tree/native-r...
Re: My Year of Riak
#7Definitely agree on the expense of a list-keys operation, be sure to avoid at all costs. Some of the Riak documentation was incomplete/incorrect which made implementation a little sticky, but the mailing list is extremely responsive and helpful. Otherwise, have had a great experience with Riak thus far. Looking forward to the ease of scaling as well!
Another operation to avoid is map/reduce over a whole bucket (so called "bucket scans"). It is extremely heavy and can often be replaced with a more clever schema.
Re: My Year of Riak
#8I love Riak. The one minor complaint that I have is having a small development/test cluster is pretty painful. If you have <N nodes, you end up with duplicated data in memory and on disk. Sucks for developers who would like a local instance to test with on their virtualized dev boxes.
Re: My Year of Riak
#9The killer feature I'm looking for is Riak's "it just works" -- especially in the case of nodes failing, soft failing, going offline, timing out, whatever. In my situation, I don't care about the performance at all, because I don't have many keys at any given moment. The few that I have matter greatly. I care that when I store a key, it's reliably, durably, stored and replicated, and that when nodes fail I don't have…
I don't want to turn this into a MongoDB vs Riak thread, but you may want to take another look at Mongo as the points you've mentioned are now handled. As of 1.6 we support automatic fail-over[1] and synchronous replication[2]. In 1.8 we added a journal for durability[3] which will be enabled by default in 2.0 (due out this month - rc2 released today). Optional automatic fail-back[4], for when your preferred primary (if any) comes back online, is also coming in 2.0.
[1] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Why+Replica+Sets
[2] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Verifying+Propagation+of...
[3] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Journaling
[4] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Replica+Sets+-+Priority
Re: My Year of Riak
#10Definitely agree on the expense of a list-keys operation, be sure to avoid at all costs. Some of the Riak documentation was incomplete/incorrect which made implementation a little sticky, but the mailing list is extremely responsive and helpful. Otherwise, have had a great experience with Riak thus far. Looking forward to the ease of scaling as well!
It's worth noting that not only is the list keys operation expensive, but since it uses Bloom filters, it's not guaranteed to returns all keys.
My sources at Basho tell me that this is fixed in 1.0, but until that's officially released, basically don't try to list keys.