On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 8:38 PM, Joshua Partogi <joshua.j...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Why don't you use Membase/Couchbase instead? It provides the same > capability as memcached but adds clustering capability on top of it. > > > Interesting you mentioned that. At work today, I went over the architecture of an application I've been writing for the last 6 months. It makes heavy use of riak. One of the architects questioned me about my choice to use Riak, as he and others are pushing strongly for Membase. I said that, for me, Riak was the path of least resistence. However, his question stuck with me and I've bee trying to read up on Membase most of the afternoon. >From what I've found, Membase does seem similar in certain ways, but vastly different in others. For example, one of the things I love about Riak is that it's built on the foundations laid out in Dynamo. Things like consistent hashing, vector clocks, hinted handoff, merkle trees, etc. I'm able to read that paper and have a good understanding of what Riak does with my data. Furthermore, I can take this knowledge with me to any other Dynamo-based solution such as BigCouch. After searching around on the Membase site for the last hour and a half I still have no idea how it achieves HA. The only thing I've found so far was a post by Dustin Sallings about memcached-vbuckets [1] which at first glance appears to be a less robust version of consistent hashing? I only skimmed, so I'm not sure. The truth is, I know very little about Membase so it's easy for me to prefer Riak. There are so many things to like: * highly available: I can destroy one (or more) of my coffe mugs [2], err I mean riak nodes, and the cluster and all it's data are still completely available * configurable CAP: N, R, W -- not only is N _trivially_ configured per bucket, but I can also configure R and W _per_ request! * scalable: adding more nodes to a running cluster is stupid simple, and the cluster remains fully operational thanks to hinted handoff * distributed/redundant/consistent hashing: I don't have to tell riak how or where to distribute the data, as I damn well shouldn't * _completely_ decentralized: there is no such thing as a master or a slave or an active node or anything like that, NO. It's just a node, like any other * multi-backend: each bucket can use a different backed, and Riak supports quite an array of backends! does anyone else offer this? * multiple client interfaces: native Erlang, protocol buffers, and most importantly, HTTP. HTTP should be required for _any_ app these days * extremely flexible map-reduce: Membase will have some form of map-reduce once "CouchBase" is delivered, but that's vaporware ATM AFAICT * key filtering * riak-search: a distributed indexing engine that uses the core technologies found in riak * riak-core: the core set of technologies responsible for all the Dynamo goodness found in riak-kv and riak-search. the app I built uses riak-core as well * luwak: a large-object store built on top of riak -- sure, you can't delete any data from it yet but I have a fork with some proof of concept code that proves it can be done, even by a simp like me So what are the high-points for Membase? What does it hit from the above and what does it miss? What does it provide that Riak doesn't? Please, if you guys think I'm hijacking this thread then tell me and I'll start another. I figur since the OP asked about memcached that it's fair game. 1: http://dustin.github.com/2010/06/29/memcached-vbuckets.html 2: http://vimeo.com/13667174 -Ryan
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