Google Cloud Datastore vs. Riak

If you want a serverless NoSQL database, no matter it is for personal use, or for company use, Google Cloud Datastore should be on top of your list, especially if you are using Google Cloud as your primary cloud platform. It integrates with all services in the Google Cloud platform.

Incentivized

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.

• Automatically handles shards and replication.
• Schema-less & NoSQL.
• Fully managed.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It is hosted on GCP, which makes it harder if your company have multi-cloud strategy.
• When you want to migrate to other cloud providers, there can be a caveat.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

For the amount of use we're getting from Google Cloud Datastore, switching to any other platform would have more cost with little gain. Not having to manage and maintain Google Cloud Datastore for over 4 years has allowed our teams to work on other things. The price is so low that almost any other option for our needs would be far more expensive in time and money.

Incentivized

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.

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.

We selected Google Cloud Datastore as one of our candidates for our NoSQL data is because it is provided by Google Cloud, which fits our needs. Most of our infrastructure is on Google Cloud, so when we think about the NoSQL database, the first thing we thought about is Google Cloud Datastore. And it proves itself.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Simple billing part of Google Cloud Platform
• No time spent configuring and maintaining Google Cloud Datastore.
• Very good uptime for our applications.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized