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CouchDB

493
572
+ 1
139
Riak

104
136
+ 1
44
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CouchDB vs Riak: What are the differences?

Developers describe CouchDB as "HTTP + JSON document database with Map Reduce views and peer-based replication". Apache CouchDB is a database that uses JSON for documents, JavaScript for MapReduce indexes, and regular HTTP for its API. CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. Access your documents and query your indexes with your web browser, via HTTP. Index, combine, and transform your documents with JavaScript. On the other hand, Riak is detailed as "A distributed, decentralized data storage system". 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.

CouchDB and Riak belong to "Databases" category of the tech stack.

"JSON" is the primary reason why developers consider CouchDB over the competitors, whereas "High Performance " was stated as the key factor in picking Riak.

CouchDB and Riak are both open source tools. CouchDB with 4.24K GitHub stars and 835 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Riak with 3.24K GitHub stars and 530 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, CouchDB has a broader approval, being mentioned in 61 company stacks & 31 developers stacks; compared to Riak, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 10 developer stacks.

Decisions about CouchDB and Riak

I’m newbie I was developing a pouchdb and couchdb app cause if the sync. Lots of learning very little code available. I dropped the project cause it consumed my life. Yeats later I’m back into it. I researched other db and came across rethinkdb and mongo for the subscription features. With socketio I should be able to create and similar sync feature. Attempted to use mongo. I attempted to use rethink. Rethink for the win. Super clear l. I had it running in minutes on my local machine and I believe it’s supposed to scale easy. Mongo wasn’t as easy and there free online db is so slow what’s the point. Very easy to find mongo code examples and use rethink code in its place. I wish I went this route years ago. All that corporate google Amazon crap get bent. The reason they have so much power in the world is cause you guys are giving it to them.

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Karan Kaushik
Senior Software Developer at Shyplite · | 5 upvotes · 36.7K views

So, we started using foundationDB for an OLAP system although the inbuilt tools for some core things like aggregation and filtering were negligible, with the high through put of the DB, we were able to handle it on the application. The system has been running pretty well for the past 6 months, although the data load isn’t very high yet, the performance is fairly promising

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James Bender
Lead Application Architect at TekPartners · | 4 upvotes · 6.9K views

Our application data all goes in SQL. We will use something like Cosmos or Couch DB if one or both of these conditions are true: * We need to ingest a large amount of bulk data from a third party, and integrating it straight into an RDBMS with referential integrity checks would create a performance hit * We need to ingest a large amount of data that does not have a clearly defined, or consistent schema. In either case, we will have a process that migrates the data from Cosmos/Couch to SQL in a way that doesn't create a noticeable performance hit and ensures that we are not introducing bad data to the system. Because of this, there is a third condition that must be met: the data that is coming in must be something that the users will not need immediately, i.e. stock ticker information, real-time telemetry from other systems for performance/safety monitoring, etc.

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Gabriel Pa

We implemented our first large scale EPR application from naologic.com using CouchDB .

Very fast, replication works great, doesn't consume much RAM, queries are blazing fast but we found a problem: the queries were very hard to write, it took a long time to figure out the API, we had to go and write our own @nodejs library to make it work properly.

It lost most of its support. Since then, we migrated to Couchbase and the learning curve was steep but all worth it. Memcached indexing out of the box, full text search works great.

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Pros of CouchDB
Pros of Riak
  • 43
    JSON
  • 30
    Open source
  • 18
    Highly available
  • 12
    Partition tolerant
  • 11
    Eventual consistency
  • 7
    Sync
  • 5
    REST API
  • 4
    Attachments mechanism to docs
  • 4
    Multi master replication
  • 3
    Changes feed
  • 1
    REST interface
  • 1
    js- and erlang-views
  • 14
    High Performance
  • 11
    High Availability
  • 9
    Easy Scalability
  • 5
    Flexible
  • 1
    Strong Consistency
  • 1
    Eventual Consistency
  • 1
    Distributed
  • 1
    Multi datacenter deployments
  • 1
    Reliable

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What is CouchDB?

Apache CouchDB is a database that uses JSON for documents, JavaScript for MapReduce indexes, and regular HTTP for its API. CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. Access your documents and query your indexes with your web browser, via HTTP. Index, combine, and transform your documents with JavaScript.

What is Riak?

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.

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What companies use CouchDB?
What companies use Riak?
See which teams inside your own company are using CouchDB or Riak.
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What tools integrate with CouchDB?
What tools integrate with Riak?

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What are some alternatives to CouchDB and Riak?
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.
Couchbase
Developed as an alternative to traditionally inflexible SQL databases, the Couchbase NoSQL database is built on an open source foundation and architected to help developers solve real-world problems and meet high scalability demands.
Cloudant
Cloudant’s distributed database as a service (DBaaS) allows developers of fast-growing web and mobile apps to focus on building and improving their products, instead of worrying about scaling and managing databases on their own.
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 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.
See all alternatives