Comments for NoSQL Live: The Dynamo Derivatives (Cassandra, Voldemort, Riak)

[phinjensen]

Comments for https://www.endpointdev.com/blog/2010/03/nosql-live-dynamo-derivatives-cassandra/ By Ethan Rowe

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[phinjensen]

original author: Sean Cribbs
date: 2010-03-12T13:55:55-05:00

Ethan, If you want more information about in-production deployments of Riak, we'd be happy to provide it. For example, our longest-running customer is Mochi Media, who has been on Riak since October '09 and has four clusters in production, supporting their high-traffic ad-delivery network.

One of the things we've tried to foster with our customers is communication on the direction of the product; in that sense, Mochi has had a large impact. However, there are only a few features that differ between the for-pay version and the open-source version of Riak, and those are mostly things that large production deployments need. The biggest feature paying customers get is access to enhanced support.

We agree that it's curious how Riak has been branded a "document database", as Riak lets you store whatever type of data you want. Obviously, JSON will have advantages in some use-cases but it's not the only format Riak supports. Also, Riak's focus on fault-tolerance and intrinsic clustering separates it significantly from Couch and Mongo.

Be sure to ask on the mailing list or #riak channel on Freenode IRC if you have questions or concerns. Cheers!

[phinjensen]

original author: Ethan Rowe
date: 2010-03-12T14:21:55-05:00

Thanks, Sean, for the info.

I saw Mochi Media listed as a customer of Basho, but as I understand it, that's on the enterprise solution that differs from the free solution in that it is non-free and somewhat more featureful (in addition to having service/support from Basho). Presumably the fundamental architecture is identical so being on the non-free version is not a wild departure (technologically) from the free version.

Architecturally, being derived so much from Dynamo, it seems obvious to me that scalability and configurability with respect to CAP are the big things here (which is what the Dynamo model really provides). But of course that's what I see, because that's what I'm interested in.

So yeah, I don't quite understand why anybody with more than a cursory knowledge of Riak would think of it primarily as a document-oriented database. However, perhaps we should forgive such a misunderstanding, given that of the three visually prominent headers on this page, the first one says "A document-oriented web database." :)

Thanks for the comment. Keep up the good work.

• Ethan

[phinjensen]

original author: Sean Cribbs
date: 2010-03-12T15:53:38-05:00

Ethan,

I don't think I made it clear enough in my first comment - the paid version provides things that "enterprise" clients and others with large deployments want: multi-cluster (long-haul) replication, and SNMP monitoring, for example. It's perfectly feasible to grow a cluster to support an application without buying the EDS product (although we'd love you to!) All of the core features of Riak that make it scale are in the open-source version.

Scaling down is also important to Riak; it goes both ways and works as well on one node as hundreds. This is a big plus for developers since the code you write on your laptop will work the same way in the cluster.

Thanks for the heads-up about the Riak page. We're working on getting the message consistent across all of our outlets.