How 3 Companies Are Using NoSQL Database Riak

By Klint Finley / February 9, 2011 5:00 PM / 1 Comment

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This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware helped virtualize 12 business critical database applications.

Today Basho, the sponsor company of the NoSQL database Riak, announced another $7.5 million round of funding from Georgetown Partners and Trifork. We've never covered Riak here, so we thought today would be a good day to take a look at how the technology is being used by a few companies. Riak is based on the Dynamo architecture and written in Erlang. Basho initially developed it for internal use, but realized that Riak was its core differentiator so it open sourced Riak Core and now sells Riak EnterpriseDS and Riak constulting.

inagist
inagist is a real-time Twitter analytics Web app. It surfaces popular tweets on a variety of subjects (world news, business news, technology, etc.) and determines trending topics within certain subject areas. It also provides a Twitter search service that prioritizes a user's own social graph. inagist uses Riak to store and query tweets and their related metadata. inagist switched to Riak from Cassandra because Cassandra was taxing its resources. It choose Riak because it's written in Erlang and allowed the company to use any backend technology. According to Inagist blog: "Currently we run the innostore back-end based on Embedded Innodb. This kind of makes Riak a distribution layer over a trusted storage layer."

Mozilla

Mozilla uses Riak as the backend for storing and analyzing Firefox 4.0 beta testing results. Mozilla needed a solution that would allow to store large amounts of data very quickly. In addition to Riak, Mozilla evaluated Cassandra and Hbase. Basho worked with Mozilla's Daniel Einspanjer to create what he called a "nearly turn-key solution." Reading Einspanjer's post on the subject, the take away is that Riak was just plain easier to use for Mozilla's purposes than HBase and Cassandra. The organization also conducted some benchmark tests, which are detailed here.

Wikia
Wikia, the 70th largest website on the Internet according to Quantcast, uses Riak to replicate user sessions data across three data centers. Wikia also uses Riak to store images. To handle this, Wikia's VP of Engineering and Operations Artur Bergman built a file system adapter and open-sourced it.
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