Overview
What is Riak?
Riak is a NoSQL database from Basho Technologies in Bellevue, Washington.
TrustRadius Insights
Riak is highly available, highly scalable, and has a fast search index.
Riak performs well as a statement document store
A No Hassle Cloud Scale DB
My Riak Review
Great product and fast, beware of deletes!
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is Riak?
Riak is a NoSQL database from Basho Technologies in Bellevue, Washington.
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What is Riak?
Riak Technical Details
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(11)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
Riak, a versatile database, has been widely utilized by various teams within organizations for a range of purposes. Users have found it extremely valuable in migrating applications from data centers to the cloud, thanks to its ability to write data that is replicated in the cloud for service lookups. Additionally, Riak's unique feature of linking objects in the database has proven instrumental in constructing hierarchical trees of documents that represent important student administrative and testing data. It serves as a foundation for the operational data store's data model and plays a pivotal role as the backend for the weekly build cycle, which processes massive amounts of data for millions of industrial parts every week. Users have also leveraged Riak's capability to simultaneously feed metadata about each item, which ensures a reliable picture of what the front-end should look like and aids in purging old data. Furthermore, Riak serves as the main database for various web applications such as storage of generated daily merchant statements and for products like the Dittach Platform, where it stores information on all objects and documents managed within the environment. One of the key factors behind choosing Riak is its high availability, scalability, and built-in Apache SOLR for fast searching and indexing, which further enhances its suitability across different use cases.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-6 of 6)Riak still alive and kicking!
- Key-Value storage along with CRDTs
- Fault tolerance
- 100% uptime
- Massively scalable
- Consistent response speeds
- Multi datacentre replication
- Geographic replication/redundancy
- Is free to use
- Lots of client libraries
- Missing a free text search function
- More security work
- Multi-tenant reporting
- More types of index optimised for different structures
- Automating repairs especially after unclean shutdowns
- WebDAV/Samba shares for Riak CS
- Implementing the SQL queries from Riak TS in Riak KV
- Settable replication bandwidth caps
- Safemode start up after failure
- More client integrations
- Highly available: If nodes go offline for any reason, the system still operates.
- Highly scalable: There is a minimum of 5 nodes, which can handle a lot by themselves. When scaling is required, it can be done easily, with minimal to no downtime on large scales.
- Very fast searching: Riak has SOLR indexing built-into the core product, which makes querying for data very fast.
- When the index definition changes, reindexing takes an extremely long time.
- Support (both paid and community based) is very very lacking.
- It is expensive to run.
Riak's SOLR engine is fast, however if you have extremely high amount of queries in a very limited time range, it can fail in a bad way.
Riak performs well as a statement document store
- Consistency model is highly distributed, so uptime of our documents is always available.
- Simple to use RESTful interface, which was easy to access from our Java application.
- Data model using catalogs and indexes was simple, making it easy to store and retrieve our statements.
- It does not have any native startup scripts in Linux.
- Since it's built on Erlang, its a bit difficult to administer.
A No Hassle Cloud Scale DB
- If you're considering a NoSQL solution, one of Riak's strengths is that it is built to scale with very low management overhead. Compare Riak to something like HBase (requires a full Hadoop cluster, along with YARN, and Zookeeper), and you'll find it's much easier to set up and maintain.
- Schemaless design in Riak makes it really easy to apply whatever design you like. Since you're not locked into seeing things just the SQL way, you've got more freedom with the type of data you store and the way you store it.
- Riak is highly reliable. It's built on a platform that's meant to be incredibly resistant to failure. If you run in Riak in a cluster or cloud based environment, you can trust that it will be very dependable.
- At the time I was using Riak, data was stored as blobs so you couldn't query the data directly on the server. This has since been remedied with the addition of full-text search support.
My Riak Review
- Reliability -- we rarely have to do anything to maintain our Riak instance. It is just online and available for whatever we throw at it.
- The Riak Python client is an excellent tool and handles parallel writes/reads very well
- There is a large and very receptive community or Riak users and developers who seem to be able to help with most technical questions that have arisen.
- It would be nice if there was a better way to configure Riak for multiple nodes with less manual configuration. Really, it's not a big deal, but I am being asked to write a "con" so this is what I thought of.
Great product and fast, beware of deletes!
- Riak is great at handling large volumes of requests. We've seen Riak perform well under large volume while keeping response times quite low.
- Riak is also fast providing consistent sub 10ms reads in both the datacenter and cloud.
- Flexible allowing storage of numerous data types. We heavily leverage this to store various JSON documents in a single bucket.
- We really like the RESTful interface that is provided. Makes the learning curve almost invisible and provides a quick speed to market in using Riak.
- Deletes!!! We've seen on numerous occasions where Riak has "resurrected" deleted data. We've worked with Basho numerous times and tried multiple changes to the way we interact with Riak to prevent the problem but it still remains. The deletes seem to reappear weeks, even months, after the delete was issued. We've had to work around this issue by providing a "deleted" flag for all data objects stored in Riak. Thus, we do no delete but simply flip the flag. Excess baggage we would really like to not have to worry about.
- Search. Currently there's no way to tell what data you have in Riak without already knowing a particular bucket/key. There is a way to list the keys for a given bucket but due to performance implications, this is not a viable method to lookup data. Especially when you have a large amount of keys in the bucket.
Riak is well suited as a key value store. It does exactly what it says it does. If you have well known buckets/keys, Riak is a great solution for a ton of different use cases. The lack of ability to search is somewhat problematic for other use cases requiring this ability.
Also, while the ability to store a variable array of data into a single bucket/key is extremely useful, if you have a use case requiring parts of that value to be updated independently, Riak does not support transactions so you open yourself up to contention issues if the data is being updated regularly in small portions. One solution to this is to use multiple bucket/key parts to store the data, which will remove the contention issue, but then you have to increase your Riak footprint which results in more buckets and can sometimes make things more difficult than needed. This has been a nagging issue we've had to deal with on multiple occasions.