Basho (Riak) raises 7.5M | Hacker News Reader

Basho (Riak) raises 7.5M

masshightech.com

43 pointsbobf19 comments

Big day for Nosql news. First Couchone + Membase = Couchbase and now Basho get some big bucks. Just shows that there are real companies out there making real money on alternate database technologies. Congrats to Basho.

They raised a 2.5M friends & family round? Need you call it a friends & family round when they're all accredited investors? :)

No kidding. That's one hell of a family. :)

> ...a more scalable alternative to traditional relational database management systems (RDMS) written in the SQL language.

Huh, apparently RDBMS' are written in SQL...and all this time I thought SQL wasn't even Turing complete.

The guys at Basho have an awesome support. They do everything possible to help you, can stay with you in a Campfire room during hours, won't leave you until the problem is fixed, and best of all, will write a report about the problem as soon as it's resolved.

I'm currently migrating from HBase to Riak.. and I'll just say that it is a huge breath of fresh air, compared to dealing with HBase. I also played with MongoDB for a bit, prior to Riak, and found it to be incredibly fast -- but Riak's ease of scalability was a huge win for me.

What does Riak do that Cassandra doesn't?

http://wiki.basho.com/Riak-Compared-to-Cassandra.html

Some of the stuff on that page is no longer current and some of it is pretty underwhelming. I guess the re-balancing story and vector clocks sound nice?

It's a wiki, if there is information you see is incorrect, please fix it.

IANAE, but while reading over the riak docs for an upcoming project, the concept of links is one that stood out. http://blog.basho.com/2010/03/25/schema-design-in-riak---rel...

Links are awesome in a small dataset, but on a larger cluster, the probability that each link walk means both an extra seek and a network roundtrip makes them less attractive.

Local graph databases avoid the extra seeks by keeping extra copies of the destination vertex immediately next to the source vertex on disk, but I don't think Riak is doing this, or that it is actually practical in an eventually consistent system.

(disclaimer: I haven't looked at Cassandra in 6 months)

Riak doesn't involve Java. It sounds trite, but that was a huge plus for our team. It has commit hooks. Search. Builtin JS VMs for mapreduce. More straightforward administration. Most operations are automatic or on-the-fly. Even though I think Cassandra+Hadoop is a technically superior product for managing absolutely huge gobs of multidimensional data (especially with its support for range queries), Riak's ease of use is pretty sweet.

Plus the team is superhumanly helpful about addressing bugs and gotchas. Everything's on Github, and contributing is pretty easy.

I can attest to their support being phenomenal. I found a critical bug last week and got a patch within hours of reporting it to their customer advocate. You don't see that kind of turnaround very often.

Riak Search is in fact great to work with.

Something comparable for Cassandra exists with Solandra (https://github.com/tjake/Lucandra/). A major difference is that you'll have to post your documents manually to the Solr Instance running with Solandra while Riaks post-receive hooks automatically do that for you.

Also: the setup is by far not as big of a pain with Riak

From my perspective, and not an expert on cassandra, but: -- Conceptually more straightforward for engineers, thus less code complexity and less bugs (and the cost of maybe less performance. I'll spend dollars on more nodes over dollars to deal with engineering complexity.) -- Operationally cassandra sounds like a PITA. I haven't run it, so I could be misinformed. -- Engineering philosophy. The Basho style is more in line with my style than the people behind cassandra. The priorities and emphasizes are different.

I've evaluated almost all of the "NoSQL" databases out there (excluding graph databases) and have settled on riak-search as the solution for my startups infrastructure.

I've been on the painful side of scaling more than once, and while I'm not planning to be bigger than facebook, I am not going to buy the world of operational hurt I have experienced in the past. Especially given that avoiding it actually saves me time and money.

At least with Riak-Search it does. Riak is a dynamo style document store / key-value database and in that regard it benefits from all notes being of a homogenous type. The thing that hurts most key-value stores is finding documents based on what they contain, and the integration of indexes (inspired by lucene, and seemingly compatible with their APIs, though I don't care about that) makes RiakSearch the winner for me. This allows for amazing power when combined with the built in map-reduce, and their flexible API.

I really want to emphasize the operational issue for me. My experiences have left me with a prejudice against any system that has more than one type of node. In riak the cluster is all homogenous nodes. No masters, no slaves, no bottlenecks. I love that scaling Riak means simply cloning another machine, and pointing it at the existing cluster, and all the machines spread the load out a bit more. That's the kind of operational story you want for a tiny startup.

FWIW, I also liked what cloudant has done with couchdb, and they are adding search features too, so that's worth checking out.

Further, we're working on several initiatives all in the same area. Most will likely produce small amounts of traffic, but when we get it right, we're going to tap into a flood. With Riak, all of these apps will be backed by the same cluster, so it doesn't matter which one happens to hit it right. I won't have to build a custom configuration or scale one particular database for the particular app that works. (This is part of our iterative process for finding product-market fit.) What matters is the total capacity of the whole cluster, and we can add nodes, and when there's enough replication, bring down a node and replace it with a bigger box... without having to shuffle data around or worry. The data just gets redistributed around the cluster to accommodate the loss or gain in capacity. The backup story is straightforward as well.

It may sound like I'm going on and on about this one feature, but easy, and brainless and automatic means it is harder for me to screw up and that lets me sleep well at night. We'll be starting tiny with a trio of cheap dedicated machines of low capacity at low cost. If we need to grow, we can do so economically, and I expect Riak will scale probably father than we will. This means I don't have to worry about architecture and I don't have to worry about operations, I just worry about the business and the product. That's a savings of two worries!

Basho is also the home to seemingly all the erlang action these days (outside of the couchdb scene)... webmachine lives there, rebar lives there, erlang-js lives there. Even the developer of nitrogen (I think) works there. And erlang is most def the right tool for the job. If your project wants to be distributed and it isn't written in erlang, you gotta have some good reasons, I think. (or be using something more exotic and more purpose built than erlang.)

I'll close with one final thing- Riak is so well engineered, and they have added so much value, that they have sucked a lot of the hard work out of the apps we're building. They really are providing a fairly complete platform to build on. Besides RiakSearch we're using webmachine, erlang-js & rebar.

Frankly, I don't mind seeing people go on about cassandra or mongodb... it just makes me feel like riak is my secret weapon that gives me a significant competitive advantage. Basho's products boost my leverage significantly.

What more could a startup engineer want?

Anyway, glad to hear Basho is able to raise the cash, and best wishes to the whole crew there.

I totally agree with you, except for the competitive advantage part. Commodity stuff, like OpenSource software is in a certain sense, has no intrinsic competitive advantage value. Nevertheless, I really wish you great success with your startup and that you derive a lot of value from Riak search over time

Has no intrinsic competitive advantage

Sure it does. You're just thinking about "cost" only in terms of money. In order to use a piece of software (and use it well) you need smart people, time, the right kind of infrastructure, and the knowledge that it's actually worth using.

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