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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Databases
  4. Databases
  5. Cassandra vs Riak

Cassandra vs Riak

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Cassandra
Cassandra
Stacks3.6K
Followers3.5K
Votes507
GitHub Stars9.5K
Forks3.8K
Riak
Riak
Stacks103
Followers137
Votes44
GitHub Stars4.0K
Forks535

Cassandra vs Riak: What are the differences?

  1. Data Model: Cassandra uses a wide-column store data model, while Riak follows the key-value store data model. This means that Cassandra organizes data into columns within rows, similar to a table, while Riak stores data as key-value pairs without a fixed schema.
  2. Consistency Model: Cassandra employs eventual consistency by default, allowing data to be inconsistent for a period and then reconciled. In contrast, Riak offers tunable consistency, allowing users to choose between strong consistency or eventual consistency based on their requirements.
  3. Partitioning: Cassandra uses consistent hashing for partitioning data across multiple nodes but relies on a coordinator node to handle requests. Riak, on the other hand, uses a decentralized partitioning strategy where each node is responsible for a subset of the keyspace, enabling high availability and scalability without a single point of failure.
  4. Concurrency Control: Cassandra uses the Last-Write-Wins (LWW) conflict resolution strategy, where the most recent write takes precedence in case of conflicts. Riak, however, uses vector clocks to track causal relationships between updates, allowing for more sophisticated conflict resolution and the ability to handle divergent replicas.
  5. Secondary Indexes: Cassandra supports secondary indexes that enable querying on non-primary key fields, but they come with performance trade-offs. Riak, on the other hand, offers search capabilities through full-text search integration with tools like Riak Search or external indexing solutions.
  6. Deployment Flexibility: Cassandra is designed for horizontal scalability and is typically deployed in clusters spanning multiple data centers for high availability and fault tolerance. Riak, while also scalable, is often chosen for its deployment simplicity, flexibility, and ease of use in premises with less complex setup requirements.

In Summary, Cassandra and Riak differ in their data models, consistency models, partitioning strategies, concurrency control mechanisms, support for secondary indexes, and deployment flexibility.

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Advice on Cassandra, Riak

Micha
Micha

CEO & Co-Founder at Dechea

May 27, 2022

Decided

Fauna is a serverless database where you store data as JSON. Also, you have build in a HTTP GraphQL interface with a full authentication & authorization layer. That means you can skip your Backend and call it directly from the Frontend. With the power, that you can write data transformation function within Fauna with her own language called FQL, we're getting a blazing fast application.

Also, Fauna takes care about scaling and backups (All data are sharded on three different locations on the globe). That means we can fully focus on writing business logic and don't have to worry anymore about infrastructure.

93k views93k
Comments
Krishna Chaitanya
Krishna Chaitanya

Head of Technology at Adonmo

Jun 27, 2021

Review

For such a more realtime-focused, data-centered application like an exchange, it's not the frontend or backend that matter much. In fact for that, they can do away with any of the popular frameworks like React/Vue/Angular for the frontend and Go/Python for the backend. For example uniswap's frontend (although much simpler than binance) is built in React. The main interesting part here would be how they are able to handle updating data so quickly. In my opinion, they might be heavily reliant on realtime processing systems like Kafka+Kafka Streams, Apache Flink or Apache Spark Stream or similar. For more processing heavy but not so real-time processing, they might be relying on OLAP and/or warehousing tools like Cassandra/Redshift. They could have also optimized few high frequent queries using NoSQL stores like mongodb (for persistance) and in-memory cache like Redis (for further perfomance boost to get millisecond latencies).

53.8k views53.8k
Comments
Umair
Umair

Technical Architect at ERP Studio

Feb 12, 2021

Needs adviceonPostgreSQLPostgreSQLTimescaleDBTimescaleDBDruidDruid

Developing a solution that collects Telemetry Data from different devices, nearly 1000 devices minimum and maximum 12000. Each device is sending 2 packets in 1 second. This is time-series data, and this data definition and different reports are saved on PostgreSQL. Like Building information, maintenance records, etc. I want to know about the best solution. This data is required for Math and ML to run different algorithms. Also, data is raw without definitions and information stored in PostgreSQL. Initially, I went with TimescaleDB due to PostgreSQL support, but to increase in sites, I started facing many issues with timescale DB in terms of flexibility of storing data.

My major requirement is also the replication of the database for reporting and different purposes. You may also suggest other options other than Druid and Cassandra. But an open source solution is appreciated.

462k views462k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Cassandra
Cassandra
Riak
Riak

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

Riak is a distributed database designed to deliver maximum data availability by distributing data across multiple servers. As long as your client can reach one Riak server, it should be able to write data. In most failure scenarios, the data you want to read should be available, although it may not be the most up-to-date version of that data.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
9.5K
GitHub Stars
4.0K
GitHub Forks
3.8K
GitHub Forks
535
Stacks
3.6K
Stacks
103
Followers
3.5K
Followers
137
Votes
507
Votes
44
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 98
    High performance
  • 81
    High availability
  • 74
    Easy scalability
  • 53
    Replication
Cons
  • 3
    Reliability of replication
  • 1
    Size
  • 1
    Updates
Pros
  • 14
    High Performance
  • 11
    High Availability
  • 9
    Easy Scalability
  • 5
    Flexible
  • 1
    Eventual Consistency

What are some alternatives to Cassandra, Riak?

MongoDB

MongoDB

MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.

MySQL

MySQL

The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft® SQL Server is a database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.

SQLite

SQLite

SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

Memcached

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

MariaDB

MariaDB

Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance.

RethinkDB

RethinkDB

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

ArangoDB

ArangoDB

A distributed free and open-source database with a flexible data model for documents, graphs, and key-values. Build high performance applications using a convenient SQL-like query language or JavaScript extensions.

InfluxDB

InfluxDB

InfluxDB is a scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics. It has a built-in HTTP API so you don't have to write any server side code to get up and running. InfluxDB is designed to be scalable, simple to install and manage, and fast to get data in and out.

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