
Ask HN: Is Riak a viable alternative to Cassandra? - nvarsj
I work with someone who is an ex-Datastax employee. He swears by Cassandra. We end up debating about it a lot, and I usually bring up Riak as a better alternative - in theory. Cassandra has so many peculiarities and gotchas, and almost requires a dedicated team to run at any non-trivial size, and good knowledge of its behaviour among the development team.<p>His point, which I can&#x27;t refute, is that Cassandra is probably the most widely used and battle tested open source distributed database out there - there are massive clusters (10s of thousands of nodes) in production use by many of the most well known engineering firms.<p>Does Riak have similar success stories? Are there any mega clusters in use at big firms? How would you argue for using Riak?
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soboleiv
I've used C* (36 nodes/20Tb) and it was pleasure to manage it even in the
early versions. At the time of picking the db (3 years ago) Riak was slower as
they only had http available so C* won by a large margin.

One case I thought Riak can be a good choice for is for quick prototyping /
interacting directly from web clients (as it has neat http API).

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bewo001
Hm, when we evaluated Cassandra not long ago, a simple full disk error managed
to get it into an unusable state, and even external experts couldn't recover
it. I know it is used extensively by many companies, but this was not exactly
encouraging.

