Apache HBase vs. Riak

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HBase
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.N/A
Riak
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Riak is a NoSQL database from Basho Technologies in Bellevue, Washington.N/A
Pricing
Apache HBaseRiak
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HBaseRiak
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache HBaseRiak
Features
Apache HBaseRiak
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache HBase
7.7
Ratings
14% below category average
Riak
9.4
Ratings
6% above category average
Performance7.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Availability7.80 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Concurrency7.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Security7.80 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Scalability8.60 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Data model flexibility7.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility8.20 Ratings10.00 Ratings
User Ratings
Apache HBaseRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache HBaseRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
HBase is well suited for streaming ingest, fast lookups, massive datasets, data warehouse lookup tables, RDBMS replacement, MongoDB replacement, key-value store, data scans, logs, JSON storage and some binary storage. My preferred use case is for storing data points like time series or data produced by sensors. I often use HBase when I need data available immediately and I am not looking for transactions. This is a great store for really wide tables with tons of columns. It is also great if you are not sure what type of data you are going to have. It really excels at sparse data.
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Riak is very good if you need a resilient data store that can handle large amounts of documents very fast. If you have 1,000,000 documents and need to execute complex queries, it is great. Riak's SOLR engine is fast, however if you have extremely high amount of queries in a very limited time range, it can fail in a bad way.
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Pros
  • Scalable and truly non-relational data
  • HBase operations run in real-time on its database rather than MapReduce jobs
  • Scales linearly to support billions of rows with millions of columns
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  • Reliability -- we rarely have to do anything to maintain our Riak instance. It is just online and available for whatever we throw at it.
  • The Riak Python client is an excellent tool and handles parallel writes/reads very well
  • There is a large and very receptive community or Riak users and developers who seem to be able to help with most technical questions that have arisen.
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Cons
  • Write performance
  • Performance support for parquet file format. supports, but performance wise still not there
  • API / library availability for spark, rather than creating a new library for it
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  • Missing a free text search function
  • More security work
  • Multi-tenant reporting
  • More types of index optimised for different structures
  • Automating repairs especially after unclean shutdowns
  • WebDAV/Samba shares for Riak CS
  • Implementing the SQL queries from Riak TS in Riak KV
  • Settable replication bandwidth caps
  • Safemode start up after failure
  • More client integrations
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Likelihood to Renew
There's really not anything else out there that I've seen comparable for my use cases. HBase has never proven me wrong. Some companies align their whole business on HBase and are moving all of their infrastructure from other database engines to HBase. It's also open source and has a very collaborative community.
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Riak works great for our use case but the fact that deletes seem to resurrect is a real issue for us. Unless we can get this solved, we'll continue to look at other products to see if our use case fits. Otherwise Riak is a great product and it fits our use case 95%. We have found work arounds to the remaining 5%.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Despite Basho going bankrupt and the project becoming fully open-source, community support is reasonably good, albeit a little slow at times. Paid enterprise-grade support is also available from former Basho engineers but the same company also contributes to the community support for free for basic questions or specific knowledge areas.
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Alternatives Considered
Compared NoSQL databases with traditional databases for faster retrieval and consistency. As MongoDB is a NoSQL supports dynamic fields, however, query performance is bad for aggregations and added maintenance. When compared with MySQL and Teradata, it could not scale up as fast as Hbase and added cost involved to it. HBase can be easily scalable to a huge volume of records, have a faster lookup and provides consistency
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MongoDB seems to have copied a lot of functionality from Riak. This may be because MongoDB hired a number of former Basho engineers when Basho went bankrupt. That said, the new functions added to Riak after it became open source have successfully differentiated itself from MongoDB.
Amazon S3 is a nice tool but when you are at significant scale with regionally specific data (joys of GDPR), it's much easier to keep it in house and Riak CS lets you do exactly that. All you need to do is point your application at Riak CS instead of Amazon S3 and it just works as if nothing has changed.
When we evaluated against Cassandra, we found the tools available did not match our needs at the time.
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Return on Investment
  • Positive: Open source, easy to use, good to store big data.
  • Negative: SQL functionalities are not available.
  • More memory utilization
  • More troubleshooting
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  • Riak's simple API and simple management model made it a no brainer when it came to adopting it as a technology for the team.
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ScreenShots