10 ms·

Why Riak should power your next Rails app

47 points by webology 17y ago

sabat 17y ago
Anyone with some Riak experience care to talk about it?
- SlyShy 17y ago
  I tried it when it was first announced, so the experience has probably been smoothed over a lot since then. It has the steepest learning curve of any nosql database I've tried so far, but perhaps for people with more Map/Reduce familiarity that won't be the case. The biggest hangup was that Map/Reduce queries could only be written in Erlang, but now it seems they can be written in JavaScript too. That'll be a nice improvement. The installation was a bit less straightforward than I would have liked, but it seemed to work fine after that. I ended up going back to Redis, because I don't actually own enough hardware to make Riak worth using.
  - anotherjesse 17y ago
    "make rel", HTTP REST interface, and JS map-reduce fixed the learning curve for me. Even if you don't have the hardware I recommend trying it again.
gfodor 17y ago
Pages and pages of feature descriptions, and not a single hard stat on people using this in production. Don't people writing these types of posts realize that that's a pre-requisite to trying to convince any decision-maker to look into their favorite pet framework/language/db/etc.? Now, it could very well be the case that nobody is using this in production, or at scale. Fine. Where's that disclosure, then? 100 whiz bang features is only one part of the process of evaluating a new piece of technology.
- hello_moto 17y ago
  Many so-called developers have no idea what they're doing... it's a typical thing in our industry... pretty sad really... instead of taking their time to learn something and master it, they jump ship as soon as a new, obscure, and rarely used technology popped up. Now you know why there are many poorly written code...
- gamingco4win 17y ago
  Research before writing. EA's world of warhammer f/b app got rid of MongoDB, which failed, to use open source Riak. Mochi uses Riak. Collecta uses Riak. These are Akamai guys who make things work at one node or at 400 nodes. Pls don't be stupid.
  - ehsanul 17y ago
    Do you know how/why MongoDB "failed" for the facebook application? It's not really clear what that actually means given your comment. Care to share a link to the story or an explanation if there is any? Also, I'm glad you informed us about Riak deployments, but the last statement is inappropriate: please don't be rude. And spelling please as "pls" makes you seem immature too.
    - sailormoon 17y ago
      He seems to be referring to this article: http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/02/01/daily27-MHT-Exclusive-Basho-maps-unstructured-road-to-web-scalability.html http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/02/01/daily27-MHT-E...
      - ehsanul 17y ago
        Nice find. However, I don't see where it says anything about MongoDB failing, though it is mentioned as a NoSQL database. Also: Another customer, Electronic Arts, uses Basho infrastructure for a system that supports 7 million daily users of Warhammer Online on Facebook, saving each player’s status every half-minute, Falco said. That's an impressive number of daily users, but it's just saving a status every half-minute? I don't see why MongoDB couldn't handle that just fine, assuming enough nodes (auto-sharding is basically working now right?).
ehsanul 17y ago
On the question of performance, Riak's FAQ says the following: We've found it to be fast enough for our purposes, and our goal is not to be "fastest" but rather to stay "fast enough" as the system grows, as hosts fail, and so on. You know what they say, when you ask about a girl and she's just called "sweet", you know she's not a looker! Riak's probably not appropriate for anyone without a cluster of over a couple dozen nodes, at least.
- z8000 17y ago
  Riak's probably not appropriate for anyone without a cluster of over a couple dozen nodes, at least. Did you pull this out of thin air?
  - ehsanul 17y ago
    Not completely, but any argument I have would be hand-waving. Hence the "probably". The number (a couple dozen) was totally out of nowhere, just making a point here. I should've added the disclaimer that I haven't used Riak, and hence nobody should take what I say seriously at all. It was just my impression from looking through the site.
patio11 17y ago
Not to be persnickety, but there is an entire world of Rails developers who don't have the problems that Riak purports to solve. I'll be a multi-millionaire bingo tycoon long, long before I outgrow MySQL, given my app's needs. (Adjust appropriately if you're Facebook. I'm not Facebook.)
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Agreed 100%. I spent some time checking it out a little while ago, and was inspired by the article to go back and have another look. Very impressive indeed. And also total, utter overkill for 99.99% of sites. And hey, I'm all for overkill, but it looks like a pretty steep learning curve; time probably better spent polishing your site based on a more traditional DB. Also, while the tech looks good, I wasn't delighted to read this: http://basho.com/enterpriseds.html http://basho.com/enterpriseds.html That's an awful lot of features held back, and the lack of specific pricing does not bode well IMO.
wheels 17y ago
Reading the description it sounds virtually identical to what I know about CouchDB: - Distributed document database - Masterless replication - HTTP interface - Map-reduce-based query system - Written in Erlang Given that, and its relative obscurity compared to CouchDB, it seems odd that they only place where they bothered to compare the two was on the specifics of their map-reduced based query system.

47 points by webology 17y ago

sabat 17y ago

Anyone with some Riak experience care to talk about it?

SlyShy 17y ago
I tried it when it was first announced, so the experience has probably been smoothed over a lot since then. It has the steepest learning curve of any nosql database I've tried so far, but perhaps for people with more Map/Reduce familiarity that won't be the case. The biggest hangup was that Map/Reduce queries could only be written in Erlang, but now it seems they can be written in JavaScript too. That'll be a nice improvement. The installation was a bit less straightforward than I would have liked, but it seemed to work fine after that. I ended up going back to Redis, because I don't actually own enough hardware to make Riak worth using.
- anotherjesse 17y ago
  "make rel", HTTP REST interface, and JS map-reduce fixed the learning curve for me. Even if you don't have the hardware I recommend trying it again.

gfodor 17y ago

Pages and pages of feature descriptions, and not a single hard stat on people using this in production. Don't people writing these types of posts realize that that's a pre-requisite to trying to convince any decision-maker to look into their favorite pet framework/language/db/etc.? Now, it could very well be the case that nobody is using this in production, or at scale. Fine. Where's that disclosure, then? 100 whiz bang features is only one part of the process of evaluating a new piece of technology.

hello_moto 17y ago
Many so-called developers have no idea what they're doing... it's a typical thing in our industry... pretty sad really... instead of taking their time to learn something and master it, they jump ship as soon as a new, obscure, and rarely used technology popped up. Now you know why there are many poorly written code...
gamingco4win 17y ago
Research before writing. EA's world of warhammer f/b app got rid of MongoDB, which failed, to use open source Riak. Mochi uses Riak. Collecta uses Riak. These are Akamai guys who make things work at one node or at 400 nodes. Pls don't be stupid.
- ehsanul 17y ago
  Do you know how/why MongoDB "failed" for the facebook application? It's not really clear what that actually means given your comment. Care to share a link to the story or an explanation if there is any? Also, I'm glad you informed us about Riak deployments, but the last statement is inappropriate: please don't be rude. And spelling please as "pls" makes you seem immature too.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    He seems to be referring to this article: http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/02/01/daily27-MHT-Exclusive-Basho-maps-unstructured-road-to-web-scalability.html http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/02/01/daily27-MHT-E...
    - ehsanul 17y ago
      Nice find. However, I don't see where it says anything about MongoDB failing, though it is mentioned as a NoSQL database. Also: Another customer, Electronic Arts, uses Basho infrastructure for a system that supports 7 million daily users of Warhammer Online on Facebook, saving each player’s status every half-minute, Falco said. That's an impressive number of daily users, but it's just saving a status every half-minute? I don't see why MongoDB couldn't handle that just fine, assuming enough nodes (auto-sharding is basically working now right?).

ehsanul 17y ago

On the question of performance, Riak's FAQ says the following: We've found it to be fast enough for our purposes, and our goal is not to be "fastest" but rather to stay "fast enough" as the system grows, as hosts fail, and so on. You know what they say, when you ask about a girl and she's just called "sweet", you know she's not a looker! Riak's probably not appropriate for anyone without a cluster of over a couple dozen nodes, at least.

z8000 17y ago
Riak's probably not appropriate for anyone without a cluster of over a couple dozen nodes, at least. Did you pull this out of thin air?
- ehsanul 17y ago
  Not completely, but any argument I have would be hand-waving. Hence the "probably". The number (a couple dozen) was totally out of nowhere, just making a point here. I should've added the disclaimer that I haven't used Riak, and hence nobody should take what I say seriously at all. It was just my impression from looking through the site.

patio11 17y ago

Not to be persnickety, but there is an entire world of Rails developers who don't have the problems that Riak purports to solve. I'll be a multi-millionaire bingo tycoon long, long before I outgrow MySQL, given my app's needs. (Adjust appropriately if you're Facebook. I'm not Facebook.)

sailormoon 17y ago
Agreed 100%. I spent some time checking it out a little while ago, and was inspired by the article to go back and have another look. Very impressive indeed. And also total, utter overkill for 99.99% of sites. And hey, I'm all for overkill, but it looks like a pretty steep learning curve; time probably better spent polishing your site based on a more traditional DB. Also, while the tech looks good, I wasn't delighted to read this: http://basho.com/enterpriseds.html http://basho.com/enterpriseds.html That's an awful lot of features held back, and the lack of specific pricing does not bode well IMO.

wheels 17y ago

Reading the description it sounds virtually identical to what I know about CouchDB: - Distributed document database - Masterless replication - HTTP interface - Map-reduce-based query system - Written in Erlang Given that, and its relative obscurity compared to CouchDB, it seems odd that they only place where they bothered to compare the two was on the specifics of their map-reduced based query system.