Likelihood to Recommend Great for REST API development, if you want a small, fast server that will send and receive JSON structures, CouchDB is hard to beat. Not great for enterprise-level relational database querying (no kidding). While by definition, document-oriented databases are not relational, porting or migrating from relational, and using CouchDB as a backend is probably not a wise move as it's reliable, but It may not always be highly available.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros It can replicate and sync with web browsers via PouchDB. This lets you keep a synced copy of your database on the client-side, which offers much faster data access than continuous HTTP requests would allow, and enables offline usage. Simple Map/Reduce support. The M/R system lets you process terabytes of documents in parallel, save the results, and only need to reprocess documents that have changed on subsequent updates. While not as powerful as Hadoop, it is an easy to use query system that's hard to screw up. Sharding and Clustering support. As of CouchDB 2.0, it supports clustering and sharding of documents between instances without needing a load balancer to determine where requests should go. Master to Master replication lets you clone, continuously backup, and listen for changes through the replication protocol, even over unreliable WAN links. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons NoSQL DB can become a challenge for seasoned RDBMS users. The map-reduce paradigm can be very demanding for first-time users. JSON format documents with Key-Value pairs are somewhat verbose and consume more storage. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Because our current solution S3 is working great and CouchDB was a nightmare. The worst is that at first, it seemed fine until we filled it with tons of data and then started to create views and actually delete.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Couchdb is very simple to use and the features are also reduced but well implemented. In order to use it the way its designed, the ui is adequate and easy. Of course, there are some other task that can't be performed through the admin ui but the minimalistic design allows you to use external libraries to develop custom scripts
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating it support is minimal also hw requirements. Also for development, we can have databases replicated everywhere and the replication is automagical. once you set up the security and the rules for replication, you are ready to go. The absence of a model let you build your app the way you want it
Read full review Alternatives Considered Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment It has saved us hours and hours of coding. It is has taught us a new way to look at things. It has taught us patience as the first few weeks with CouchDB were not pleasant. It was not easy to pick up like MongoDB. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots