MongoDB vs. Riak

MongoDB [is] great at storing JSON data grouped into "collections". In this format, you can store any JSON documents and conveniently categorize them by collections. The JSON document contained in MongoDB is called binary JSON or BSON and, like any other document in this format, is unstructured. Therefore, unlike traditional DBMS, any kind of data can be stored in collections, and this flexibility is combined with the horizontal scalability of the database. It should be noted that MongoDB does not have links between documents and “collections” (this is partially compensated by the Database Reference - links in the DBMS, but this does not completely solve the problem). As a result, a situation arises in which there is a certain set of data that is not related to other information in the database, and there is no way to combine data from different documents. In SQL systems, this would be an elementary task.

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

• Easy to learn. When I picked up MongoDB for the first time, I had little background in database management or modeling. If you have a background in javascript (and JSON)... then you can figure out how to use MongoDB pretty fast.
• Fast performance.
• It's relatively easy to set up in certain environments because there are lots of ready-made solutions out there.
• There's a lot of support in the existing ecosystem for it —, especially in the node.js realm.
• Query syntax is pretty simple to grasp and utilize.
• Aggregate functions are powerful.
• Scaling options.
• Documentation is quite good and versioned for each release.

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

• I love the idea of Map-Reduce native support in MongoDB. Admittedly I have not used it as much as I would like -- it always seems to trip me up.
• Recent additions to the aggregation queries have helped reduce (no pun intended) my need to better wield the weapon that is Map-Reduce.

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

MongoDB is one of the most famous non-relational databases in the world, there are famous active projects that use this database. I think that the same company that develops the database gives you the online induction totally free is something that really is very positive. Accounts with a first-class support to be able to relate the correct implementation of the database, in addition to teaching you the best practices to optimize your projects, I believe that with this decision it is more than obvious which is the best decision at the time of seeing with which database to work.

Incentivized

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

It is one of the reasons why we prefer it to store documents in a JSON-style format, to access the desired document very quickly regardless of its size, to be readable by human eyes, and to be easily scalable and manageable.

Incentivized

I have reached multiple times to the MongoDB community for the help and they have provided each and easy solution for every problem. Over the internet and on stack overflow many people responds over the challenges. Now this tool is very much used in every company and projects so internally many people are there to give a support.

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.

While the setup and configuration of MongoDB is pretty straight forward, having a vendor that performs automatic backups and scales the cluster automatically is very convenient. If you do not have a system administrator or DBA familiar with MongoDB on hand, it's a very good idea to use a 3rd party vendor that specializes in MongoDB hosting. The value is very well worth it over hosting it yourself since the cost is often reasonable among providers.

Incentivized

The environment I work in is somewhat unique in that we use both MySQL and MongoDB. However, each is used for specific purposes that the other is not well suited for. MongoDB is not a relational database like MySQL, so it serves as the perfect place to dump key bits of data for quick retrieval later. This is something we can't easily do with MySQL. On this smaller database, MongoDB also lets us retrieve data more quickly with its fast and efficient querying.

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.

• We can make more open and flexible systems due to its easy adaptation to new evolutions in web applications.
• In the latest versions it offers support for different transactions and we could carry out real tests related to the concurrency of the application.
• MongoDB allows you to have distributed clusters, which improves the speed of the queries by reducing the latency that exists between the database cluster and the service that executes the query.

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