Amazon SimpleDB vs. Riak

Well suited for: Games, Chat rooms, real time software like corporate events, marathons and so. Anytime and anywhere you could use a NoSQL DB you should think of SimpleDB.

As an arduous AWS user, Amazon SimpleDB easily integrates with EC2 and other AWS module; and if you are not an AWS user, you also have a fantastic tool that will solve the problem for which you are focused.

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

• Flexibility
• Easy to learn and use
• AWS integration

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

• Non AWS environments
• Strict storage limit (but well we have DynamoDB for storage issues)

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

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

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.

It integrates beautifully with AWS. In some projects we use SimpleDB while we use DynamoDB for others, according to the characteristics of the project. If the infrastructure is AWS, we always think of one of them.

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.

• Reduced database administration time
• Reduced data model analysis time
• Lower cost of resources in projects in general

Incentivized

• 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