Aerospike vs. Riak

We were developing an advertisement time auction application, where we had to store the client's personal details, advertisement-related details, location, and many other details. Moreover, we required a promotion, cookies, and a few more details from the front end. All this information is heavy in terms of size and cannot be lost if the server crash. So, we required an extremely fast disk database with high scalability and low throughput.

Incentivized

Riak is very good if you need a resilient data store that can handle large amounts of documents very fast. If you have 1,000,000 documents and need to execute complex queries, it is great. 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.

Incentivized

• featured with robustness and reliability
• low hardware resource consumption especially RAM
• open-source
• distributed no-sql server

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• AQL is pretty limited and not as useful as the java client
• Documentation can be lacking for some products
• replication configuration is complicated

Incentivized

• 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

If money isn't an issue, and you're not on the cloud, then I'd go with Aerospike. If you're the cloud ie, aws or azure, then i'd stick with dynamoDB or Cosmos then. Aerospike is definitely not something you want to put into the cloud. It doesn't work well w/ cross regions. If cross DC, you'll have to write some stuff for data integrity checks.

Incentivized

Riak works great for our use case but the fact that deletes seem to resurrect is a real issue for us. Unless we can get this solved, we'll continue to look at other products to see if our use case fits. Otherwise Riak is a great product and it fits our use case 95%. We have found work arounds to the remaining 5%.

Incentivized

Could be easier to use and install. Also developer experience needs some work

We used the community edition.

Incentivized

Despite Basho going bankrupt and the project becoming fully open-source, community support is reasonably good, albeit a little slow at times. Paid enterprise-grade support is also available from former Basho engineers but the same company also contributes to the community support for free for basic questions or specific knowledge areas.

Aerospike is much more performant than MongoDB, however there is much greater community adoption and support for mongo

Incentivized

MongoDB seems to have copied a lot of functionality from Riak. This may be because MongoDB hired a number of former Basho engineers when Basho went bankrupt. That said, the new functions added to Riak after it became open source have successfully differentiated itself from MongoDB.

Amazon S3 is a nice tool but when you are at significant scale with regionally specific data (joys of GDPR), it's much easier to keep it in house and Riak CS lets you do exactly that. All you need to do is point your application at Riak CS instead of Amazon S3 and it just works as if nothing has changed.

When we evaluated against Cassandra, we found the tools available did not match our needs at the time.

• Being able to power the same workload on a fraction of the servers has led to better ROI for my application.
• Less servers needed also meant less time to manage the cluster, leading to savings in engineering time

• Riak's simple API and simple management model made it a no brainer when it came to adopting it as a technology for the team.

Incentivized