logoalt Hacker News

vosperlast Tuesday at 9:03 PM4 repliesview on HN

Who would this be for in 2024?

I remember evaluating Riak back in 2011 or so for an analytics solution, but ended up going with a more traditional OLAP database that was a much better option.

It's hard for me to imagine where Riak would be a good option given how many choices we have today for various data stores.


Replies

EwanToolast Tuesday at 10:17 PM

It's realistically for the handful (dozens at most?) of very large Riak implementations where it would be enormously expensive to rewrite the application running on top of it.

For example, the UK NHS Spine messaging system which has been building on Riak for 10 years

https://riak.com/posts/press/nhs-launches-upgraded-it-backbo...

nicholas-adamsyesterday at 3:50 AM

I think that in the time since 2011, things have changed more than a bit. As my employer provides Enterprise Grade Riak Support (and, of course, OpenRiak support), I'm under NDA and cannot really share names. However, I can share that that there are quite a few places that use Riak.

Here are a few off the top of my head:

- the biggest online betting company in the world

- one of Japan's largest e-commerce sites

- a large Hungarian bank

- one of China's largest electronic manufacturers

- arguably Asia's largest or second largest messaging platform

- a significant Indian online-documentation provider

- one of the largest US insurance providers

- an Australian app analytics provider

- a European telephone services provider

- one of the world's largest travel sites

- an Asian-based credit-card fraud detection service

- a number of start ups in various industries

- me - I do my crypto taxes using a 5 node Riak cluster running on Raspberry Pi's

In the Basho era (up to early 2017), Riak may have only been targetted to larger players but now, when it comes to areas such as in-house data sovereignty, compliance (e.g. GDPR), the flexibility, speed and reliability Riak now provides plus being free to run, people from individuals to corporates are starting to wake up and see the advantages.

(edited in an attempt to improve list formatting)

show 1 reply
sitkacklast Tuesday at 10:11 PM

It is a fault tolerant massively scalable key value store capable of handling hundreds of terabytes of data.

What are these options you are thinking of?

The only thing that comes to my mind is Aerospike and possibly ScyllaDB.

show 2 replies
felixgallolast Tuesday at 9:08 PM

Riak isn’t remotely like OLAP. What was your use case?

show 1 reply