Amazon DynamoDB vs Riak

• It's very easy to get started, creating a table with a partition/sort key and you're on your way.
• You can scale up and down your read/write IO as needed.
• You can store structured and unstructured data.
• It works great with Web Development as it's JSON based.

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• 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.

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• Complex searching (no support for case-insensitive or full-text search).
• Only supports up to two-key indexes.
• Requires choosing the indexes up-front when doing searches.
• Does not have an SQL compatible query front-end.
• No join-table support (requires putting all data into one table).

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• It does not have any native startup scripts in Linux.
• Since it's built on Erlang, its a bit difficult to administer.

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• Since the Amazon manages the instance, the amount of time a developer needs to spend configuring the database is less. For comparison, if we were to manage the same instance manually, we need to set up EC2 instance, install the DB, setup backup scripts, track backup failures, which is a great overhead for the dev. Using DynamoDB this overhead is reduced and hence having a great ROI.
• Great documentation and easy setup makes an easy learning curve to transition to DynamoDB. Only caveat is as with any database, the data structure should be thoroughly analyzed for types of querying because there are limitations with the DynamoDB API.
• Ties very well with rest of the Amazon eco system. Having rest of the applications in Amazon allows managing the application security a breeze.

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• 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.

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