

Big Data: Riak or Cassandra? - telmich

Hey guys,<p>I am a system administrator and was given the incredible well documented task to support "Big Data". In this particular case, the idea is to get an impression of the user behaviour on a quite big Swiss website by the means of aggregating all log data and querying it later for analysis.<p>Our Java coders are mostly settled to "Let's do cassandra!" while Riak also looks interesting. Having to support "schema changes" and running it in a mission critical environment (i.e. 0% downtime) are some requirements.<p>We already have mongodb running, but mongodb's sharding makes life hard when you are a sysadmin and think about backups.<p>So my question to you is:<p>Given the two alternatives, which one would you choose if it was you to run the infrastructure?
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stephenpiment
I have to agree with the other comments that you seem to have prematurely
narrowed your options. The requirements that you mention are pretty broad and
don't really pick out Riak or Cassandra in particular.

You may want to ask, What are your requirements for data consistency? Will you
need to build reliable abstractions on top of your data store? If so, you may
want to look at other options, such as FoundationDB.

Stephen Pimentel, foundationdb.com

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sonabinu
Why not ask yourself the question "Why Cassandra?" or "Why Riak?" or "why you
are specifically looking at these two alternatives" for the task at hand. This
way you know what each of these could do for your situation. Once you have
established that, it will be easier to look at other factors.

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WattUpDev
I'm a fan of Riak but like "sonabinu" said. It's more about why you are
considering these two options.

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bernatfp
Have you also considered HBase?

