Amazon DynamoDB vs Riak

Likelihood to Recommend

It is ideal for those projects where you need to store a large amount of data, but you do not know how many will be so you need the database to increase its storage capacity together with the number of users, without having to spend extra money, it also has a great potential thanks to the fast connection it offers, so the data travels at high speed, and this speeds up the performance of the applications, excellent for projects where non-relational databases are used and what matters is to store large quantities of information and use them at high speed.

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Winston Mendes

Software Developer

Globalsoft SolutionsComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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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.

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Adam Stern

CTO (Chief Technical Officer)

DittachComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon DynamoDB

Riak

Performance

Availability

Concurrency

Security

Scalability

Data model flexibility

Deployment model flexibility

Pros

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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Bob Smith

Founder, Owner

CodeLinguists LLCComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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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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Gerald Chenvert

Sr. Web Engineer

Best BuyRetail, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

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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Chris Moyer

VP of Technology

NewstexComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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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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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 201-500 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Amazon DynamoDB 8.7

Based on 34 answers

We will most likely continue to use DynamoDB for certain use-cases. If we stopped using DynamoDB as often, it would likely be because we started using Aurora Serverless more. Aurora Serverless may offer similar availability, management and cost benefits while allowing developers to use their MySQL tools and experience.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Research Company, 11-50 employees

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Riak 9.0

Based on 5 answers

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.

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Jared Holmberg

Principle Software Engineer

Centripetal NetworksEducation Management, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

We evaluated using MongoDB or Amazon DyanmoDB. For us, the biggest advantage is that there's no maintenance cost for Amazon DynamoDB. Mongo gets complicated when you setup sharding. With Amazon DynamoDB, it's literally a push of button to increase throughput. This saves time and money on DevOps resources.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Every database has positives and negatives. Redis is very good at set operations, but not as good at executing fast queries. MongoDB is a much cheaper data store than Riak, but not as highly available and scalable. Searching Riak is also faster than searching MongoDB or Redis. Riak also scales better than MongoDB in the long run.

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Adam Stern

CTO (Chief Technical Officer)

DittachComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

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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Anudeep Palanki

Application Developer

Monsanto CompanyFarming, 10,001+ employees

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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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Jeff Peck

Senior Software Engineer

Esperdyne TechnologiesComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon DynamoDB Editions & Modules

Edition

On-Demand - Write Operation	$1.25¹
On-Demand Read Operation	$0.25¹
On-Demand Data Stored	$0.25²
On-Demand Point-in-Time Recovery	$0.20²
On-Demand Snapshot	$0.10²
On-Demand Restoring a Backup	$0.15³
On-Demand Global Tables	$1.875⁴
On-Demand Streams	$0.02⁵
On-Demand Data Requests Outside AWS Regions	$0.09⁶
Provisioned - Write Operation	$0.00065⁷
Provisioned - Read Operation	$0.00013⁷
Provisioned - Data Stored	$0.25⁸
Provisioned - Point-in-Time Recovery	$0.20⁸
Provisioned - Snapshot	$0.10⁸
Provisioned - Restoring a Backup	$0.15⁹
Provisioned - Global Tables	$0.000975¹⁰
Provisioned - Streams	$0.02¹¹
Provisioned - Data Requests Outside AWS Regions	$0.09¹²

per million requests
per GB per month
per GB
per million write operations replicated
per 100,000 read operations
per GB
capacity unit per hour
per GB per month
per GB
per Read Capacity
per 100,000 read operations
per GB

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Riak Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon DynamoDB

Riak

Amazon DynamoDB

Riak

Amazon DynamoDB vs Riak

Amazon DynamoDB

Riak

Feature Rating Comparison

NoSQL Databases

Performance

Availability

Concurrency

Security

Scalability

Data model flexibility

Deployment model flexibility

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Renew

Alternatives Considered

Return on Investment

Screenshots

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Amazon DynamoDB Editions & Modules

Edition

Additional Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Riak Editions & Modules

Additional Pricing Details

Rating Summary

Likelihood to Recommend

Likelihood to Renew

Add comparison