

Basho (Riak) raises 7.5M - bobf
http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2011/02/07/daily18-Basho-raises-75M-to-expand-NoSQL-database-sales.html

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siculars
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.

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

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

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m0th87
> ...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.

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nfo
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.

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bobf
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.

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nosqlguy
What does Riak do that Cassandra doesn't?

~~~
aphyr
(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.

~~~
herewego
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.

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nika
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.

~~~
zeit_geist
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

~~~
aphyr
_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.

