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Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

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219 points amarsahinovic | 3 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.566s | source
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tibbar ◴[19 Nov 24 21:09 UTC] No.42188120[source]▶
I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.
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macintux ◴[19 Nov 24 21:24 UTC] No.42188238[source]▶
Speaking as a former tech evangelist/engineer at Basho, there were a few significant challenges.

Riak is horribly unfriendly as a database: no SQL, it exposes eventual consistency directly to the developer, it’s relatively slow, and Erlang is a fairly unusual language.

While you can run Riak on a single server, you’d have to really want to.

Its strength is the ability to scale massively, but not many projects need that scale, and by the time you do, you’re probably already using some friendlier database and you’d rather make that one work.

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1. cmrdporcupine ◴[19 Nov 24 22:02 UTC] No.42188580[source]▶
Thing is, Cassandra became and remained popular, with similar aspects (though in JVM instead of Erlang, so).

Though it had a couple years head start when there really no other options for people wanting that kind of kit.

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2. wbl ◴[20 Nov 24 03:01 UTC] No.42190476[source]▶
I feel building a threat intelligence product on Cassandra is a bit on the nose. What's next, calling the TCB Palladium?
3. mst ◴[20 Nov 24 12:10 UTC] No.42193171[source]▶
I remember somebody whose competence I rate highly talking about ending up picking Cassandra over Riak (at a point where Riak was technically decently mature) simply because of availability of ops expertise - basically his take seemed to be that Basho support was solid but they hadn't succeeded at cultivating people he could *hire* to handle as much as possible in house before calling in the gurus.

(I can't, of course, speak to the truth of this, only that over a couple decades of knowing the dude in question and working with him on and off he had sufficient Clue that I expect he did put in the effort before coming to that conclusion)