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 well suited to applications such as:

Transaction logging e.g. financial transactions and/or exchange rates.

Storing time series data, especially IoT.

Storing massive amounts of data e.g. corporation wide backups, data lakes etc.

A fully s3 compatible replacement for Amazon s3 ensuring data privacy.

Riak is not as well suited to:

Traditional RDBMS functions, especially those that join the outputs of one or more queries together to produce the desired result.

• Low latency
• Stable
• Highly configurable
• increasing features

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Load balancing per network segments.
• Reduction in price.
• Cross datacenter replication usage isn't so straightforward. Sometimes cross dc replication can have issues of bad data..

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Right now, I'm on a project where we need databases that can run on embedded systems. Riak isn't necessarily the best fit for that scenario. But when we need a clustered database, that's where we'd start considering Riak.

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

Because of the RESTful HTTP interface, the consistency model, and because of the catalog-driven data model, Riak was an easy win over Redis and Memcached.

Incentivized

• 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 has been a key part of our company's build process for our client's search backend. It is valuable for is in that it provides a reliable way to view the current search index.

Incentivized