Riak 1.0

http://www.basho.com/news_riak_v1_0.php

by franze • 15 years ago

166 39 15 years ago

geoffhill• 15 years ago

LevelDB support! Would love to see how it compares to Bitcask in terms of speed.

Ixiaus2• 15 years ago

I imagine it won't be as fast? The cool thing about Bitcask is that all of the keys are in memory - I imagine that would also be beneficial with secondary indexes now supported...

LevelDB seems mostly well suited for data that becomes (in terms of key size and number of keys) bigger than your RAM...

dsl2• 15 years ago

I think it will be a welcome change for anyone who runs a decent sized Riak deployment. We are currently adding machines simply to increase available RAM in the cluster.

varworld• 15 years ago

Secondary indexes are currently only supported on levelDB.

willbmoss• 15 years ago

Bitcask can guarantee one disk seek, whereas LevelDB will do one disk seek per level, so at least from that perspective, it can't be better.

Level also has to look down the entire tree if a key is missing. This means inserts end up being more expensive than reads or updates (which are all just a hash lookup in Bitcask).

nosequel3• 15 years ago

LevelDB is there as the replacement for those who are currently using Innostore as their backend and not for those who have a dataset that fits bitcask.

fizx• 15 years ago

"Bitcask can guarantee one disk seek, whereas LevelDB will do one disk seek per level, so at least from that perspective, it can't be better."

Yep, this is a standard tradeoff. When you want your data to be iterable, you have to take the hit. In practice (I oversee a large cassandra cluster), this hit happens about ~1% of the time, which is either a lot, or a little, depending on your constraints.

"Level also has to look down the entire tree if a key is missing."

This is why Cassandra has a bloom filter on top of a very similar data store.

tsuraan• 15 years ago

Notice that this is a bit of a pre-announcement:

  Riak 1.0 will be available later this month. To preview 
  some of the new features, download Riak, or to inquire 
  about a commercial deployment, please visit http://www.basho.com.

Their github page still just has 1.0-rc1 tagged. I'm excited though.

superjared• 15 years ago

"Riak 1.0 will be available later this month."

I can't stand pre-announcements like this.

timf• 15 years ago

Further, there are only three days left.. The HN title should be changed away from "Riak 1.0".

pjscott• 15 years ago

This is actually an announcement of RC1 being released:

http://downloads.basho.com/riak/riak-1.0.0rc1/

I just did a rolling upgrade from 1.0b4, and it went smoothly. I love the LevelDB support, and it's holding up well under the considerable load that I'm throwing at it.

nosequel3• 15 years ago

Riak 1.0.0 RC2 is out now, and "later this month" is only 3 more days.

nirvana3• 15 years ago

I think when you've got your release candidate, you're basically done, barring any unexpected surprises. Given stable Riak has been during the beta period, I don't think they're really jumping the gun much.

jibs3• 15 years ago

A bit tangential to this particular announcement - but i've been musing about using Riak, though so far put off by their (seemingly) open-core, rather than open-source implementation. Are the paid, enterprise functions stuff you eventually need in most use cases? the lack of multi-site replication in particular is curious; would this mean I can replicate between nodes on the cluster, as long as they are in the same datacenter, but not across the interwebs until i hand over some $$$?

skeltoac2• 15 years ago

Enterprise includes a ring replication layer designed for higher-latency connections.

There is nothing preventing you setting up a cluster that spans continents. What will deter you is the poor performance of the cluster due to the added latency between nodes.

jibs3• 15 years ago

Interesting - from what I remember of the the original Amazon Dynamo paper it seems the ring replication is pretty central to the thing (if we are both talking about the ring replication used for the distribution of keys across the nodes). This is sounding like crippleware :(

technoweenie• 15 years ago

From what I understand, you could build the same functionality on your own if you wanted. Riak has post-commit hooks that you can tap into. I think the multi-dc replication uses them, though I'm not positive.

nirvana3• 15 years ago

Riak is Open Source. It contains a very complete platform. Riak Core is a dynamo style distributed system platform (not database specific), Riak Pipe is workflows, Riak KV is a KV database, Riak Search is full text search over that database. And there's lot of other stuff I'm not even mentioning (like bitcask, the logging stuff, etc.)

When you go to the Riak project on github, what you find is actually sort of a skeleton, that has as dependancies all those projects I mentioned above, such as riak_kv, riak_pipe, etc.

Riak ES, the commercial offering, is a superset of Riak. It has Riak as a dependency, and adds the feature of cross datacenter replication. I think the real reason you buy Riak ES is because you're wanting to buy support.

Riak ES being a commercial product doesn't make Riak any less open source, than Oracle Server being a commercial product makes Linux less open source.

Also, Basho is keen to develop users of Riak ES, and customers of Riak (who don't spend any money) still get some support from Basho. Basho has a "Riak ES for startups" program, which gives you a huge discount.

I'm building my business on Riak because Riak is open source. IF Basho goes away, I'll still have Riak. There's nothing missing from Riak that I need.

I figure if I get big enough where I want to be running out of multiple data centers, I'll be big enough to afford Riak ES, and if I can't afford Riak ES at that point, then I'll be able to build my own solution. (I don't think it would be that hard, actually.)

neonkiwi• 15 years ago

> I figure if I get big enough where I want to be running out of multiple data centers, I'll be big enough to afford Riak ES

I was thinking along those exact same lines, but a big unknown was pricing on their enterprise offering. That information is unavailable on the web, and despite my skepticism in contact-us-for-the-price situations, I filled out their online form, which is a request to be contacted by a representative.

I haven't heard from them, but they did put me on a mailing list—I got an email about this 'milestone release' today! Not quite what I wanted to know, though :)

Nirvana, or someone using their Enterprise offering, perhaps you could fill us all in on the price?

gizzlon• 15 years ago

I guess what he mean was this: "Open core (a.k.a. proprietary relicensing[1]) is a business model where an open source product is also made available commercially with non-open-source additions" [1]

I cant speak to Riak, but generally this model can create a conflict of interest between the "enterprise features" on the one hand and open source commitments on the other. For example if someone submits code to the opensource version that duplicates/overlaps an "enterprise feature"

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_core

vdm• 15 years ago

> Interested in Riak Enterprise for your company? Contact Us Now

I don't have a company. Yet.

What I am interested in is a go-away button on this obnoxious ad bar so I can read your webpages on my vertically-challenged 11" screen.

lwat• 15 years ago

Is anyone here paying for the Enterprise level Riak? I'd love to hear how they charge and whether you think it's worth it. Currently we're looking towards the Denali release later this year but Riak is looking more interesting by the day.

latch• 15 years ago

I haven't used Riak, but I did look into it for a project short while back. One problem I had was that the documentation on their website is heavily focused on what Riak is, vs how to use it. It's great that you can get such a fundamental understanding of Riak as-a-dynamo-implementation, and they do a great job writing that stuff, but its completely out of touch with what I expected/needed.

Technically, what eventually put me off, is that I couldn't figure out how to maintain a clean secondary index. If you have a: SiteId, UserId, Data, and you want data to be accessible by SiteId or SiteId+UserId, I couldn't figure out a nice atomic way to maintain the secondary index. This is pretty basic stuff. I'm glad to see 1.0 will support native secondary indexes, but I think my inability to figure it out shows that their documentation is poor (or it could be that I suck).

bgentry• 15 years ago

The secondary index stuff is actually very new, so it's entirely possible that it didn't exist when you last looked at Riak.

More info here http://blog.basho.com/2011/09/14/Secondary-Indexes-in-Riak/

socratic2• 15 years ago

I am increasingly interested in Riak, in part because a very vocal minority on HN seems to think it is the One True NoSQL solution.

However, I still don't quite get it. What is Riak? It seems to be some sort of Dynamo implementation (like the ironically ill fated Cassandra), but apparently it has a workflow engine? What do people use it for? What is it best at?

Right now we're using PostgreSQL, Redis, and S3. PostgreSQL gives us ACID, Redis gives us fast in-memory access, and S3 gives us an infinite KV store. Is there some reason to use Riak? Would Riak just replace S3?

amock• 15 years ago

If your values are very small Riak is probably a good replacement for S3. If your values are large then S3 is probably better than Riak.

siculars• 15 years ago

I'm not so certain. A value written to riak has something on the order of 450bytes of overhead (as of version 0.14, not entirely certain of the exact overhead in 1.0). Basically riak will write your value to disk with a bunch of other data that it uses internally to do its thing. Writing a stream of integers, one integer per riak key, would be a bad idea (tm), imho.

kennystone• 15 years ago

Ultimately it is a eventually consistent key-value store. They have map-reduce and a new meta-data thing that lets you query documents, but you really only want to use it if your data maps well to key/value (and lots of data does!). The really cool things are that it is truly horizontal scale - a new node brings read+write+map-reduce power, and that it will help you sleep better with its dynamo-ism.

dschobel• 15 years ago

Why do you say that Cassandra is ill-fated?

socratic2• 15 years ago

NoSQL seems to me to be a scene as much driven by hype as logic. (For better or worse, practitioners using and programming NoSQL systems tend to have little understanding of the 30+ years of relevant RDBMS academic literature, and 20+ years of distributed RDBMS academic literature.)

Given that, NoSQL adoption often appears driven by success stories. But Cassandra seems to have the opposite: numerous failure stories. Facebook, Digg, Reddit and a number of others have all tried Cassandra in production, and have either had serious complaints or moved off to either SQL or other solutions like HBase.

Of course, these failure stories are anecdotes, and numerous unrelated factors (like bad interactions between Cassandra and Amazon's EC2) could be at fault. But I'm not sure it matters.

Has anyone on HN had a really good experience with Cassandra? (This may be the wrong thread to ask for obvious reasons.)

Riak 1.0

Related Stories