Apache HBase vs. Riak

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HBase
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.N/A
Riak
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Riak is a NoSQL database from Basho Technologies in Bellevue, Washington.N/A
Pricing
Apache HBaseRiak
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HBaseRiak
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache HBaseRiak
Considered Both Products
HBase

No answer on this topic

Riak
Chose Riak
At the time I worked on the project those were the three competing technologies I evaluated. Couchbase didn't have memcache integrated at the time. Riak was by far the easiest to set up, and it's linking capability struck the right balance of having just enough relational …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Apache HBaseRiak
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache HBase
7.7
5 Ratings
13% below category average
Riak
9.4
2 Ratings
7% above category average
Performance7.15 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Availability7.85 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Concurrency7.05 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Security7.85 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Scalability8.65 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Data model flexibility7.15 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility8.25 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache HBaseRiak
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache HBaseRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(10 ratings)
10.0
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(10 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache HBaseRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache
Hbase is well suited for large organizations with millions of operations performing on tables, real-time lookup of records in a table, range queries, random reads and writes and online analytics operations. Hbase cannot be replaced for traditional databases as it cannot support all the features, CPU and memory intensive. Observed increased latency when using with MapReduce job joins.
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Basho Technologies
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.
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Pros
Apache
  • Scalability. HBase can scale to trillions of records.
  • Fast. HBase is extremely fast to scan values or retrieve individual records by key.
  • HBase can be accessed by standard SQL via Apache Phoenix.
  • Integrated. I can easily store and retrieve data from HBase using Apache Spark.
  • It is easy to set up DR and backups.
  • Ingest. It is easy to ingest data into HBase via shell, Java, Apache NiFi, Storm, Spark, Flink, Python and other means.
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Basho Technologies
  • 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.
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Cons
Apache
  • There are very few commands in HBase.
  • Stored procedures functionality is not available so it should be implemented.
  • HBase is CPU and Memory intensive with large sequential input or output access while as Map Reduce jobs are primarily input or output bound with fixed memory. HBase integrated with Map-reduce jobs will result in random latencies.
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Basho Technologies
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Apache
There's really not anything else out there that I've seen comparable for my use cases. HBase has never proven me wrong. Some companies align their whole business on HBase and are moving all of their infrastructure from other database engines to HBase. It's also open source and has a very collaborative community.
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Basho Technologies
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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Support Rating
Apache
No answers on this topic
Basho Technologies
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Apache
Cassandra os great for writes. But with large datasets, depending, not as great as HBASE. Cassandra does support parquet now. HBase still performance issues. Cassandra has use cases of being used as time series. HBase, it fails miserably. GeoSpatial data, Hbase does work to an extent. HA between the two are almost the same.
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Basho Technologies
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.
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Return on Investment
Apache
  • As Hbase is a noSql database, here we don't have transaction support and we cannot do many operations on the data.
  • Not having the feature of primary or a composite primary key is an issue as the architecture to be defined cannot be the same legacy type. Also the transaction concept is not applicable here.
  • The way data is printed on console is not so user-friendly. So we had to use some abstraction over HBase (eg apache phoenix) which means there is one new component to handle.
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Basho Technologies
  • 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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ScreenShots