Riak is a highly available, low-latency database for retailers that need to provide always-on eCommerce and mobile services. Some key technical benefits of Riak for retailers include:
Highly Available Experience for Shoppers: Riak’s design ensures that users can always add products to the shopping cart and that content will always be served at low-latency.Scale to Peak Loads with Low Operational Cost: Riak lets retailers increase their capacity quickly during major holidays or other high traffic periods.Global Data Locality: Riak Enterprise’s multi-datacenter replication provides a global data footprint and failover to secondary sites in the event of datacenter failure.
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USE CASES
Here are some common ways retailers use Riak:
CASE STUDIES
Riak has been an integral part in the trasformation push to re-platform Best Buy’s eCommerce platform. Riak’s architecture has helped Best Buy build and operate its platform. For more information on Best Buy and Riak, check out Joel Crabb, Director of Web Architecture at BestBuy.com, speak at RICON2012, Basho’s 2012 developer conference.
ideeli is one of the fastest growing retailers in the US. They use Riak to serve HTML documents and user-specific products. ideeli chose Riak to power their event-based shopping experience due to Riak’s ability to serve users information at low-latency and provide ease of use and scale to ideeli’s operations team. For more information on ideeli’s use of Riak, check out the complete case study.
Copious is a social commerce marketplace that makes it easy for people to buy and sell the things they love. They currently store all registered accounts in Riak as well as the tokens that make it possible for users to authenticate with Copious via their Facebook or Twitter accounts. They chose to use Riak for their social login functionality because of its operational simplicity. For more information, check out Rob Zuber, Copious Co-Founder, speak on how they are using Riak for their multi-datastore strategy.
DATA MODELING IN RIAK
Riak has a “schemaless” design. Objects are comprised of key/value pairs, which are stored in flat namespaces called buckets. Here are some common approaches to structuring retail data with Riak’s key/value design:
| Data Type | Key | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Item in Product Inventory | Product ID | JSON, XML, Text or HTML document |
| Product Advertising | Campaign Identifier | Ad Content |
| User Profile | Login, Email, UUID | User Attributes (often stored as a JSON document) |
| Image or Video Content | Content Name, ID or Integer | .JPG .PNG, .GIF or other image format; .MOV, .MPG, .MP4 or other video file format |
| Session Information | User/Session ID | Session Data |
Riak also offers robust querying, including:
Riak Search: A distributed, full-text search engine. It provides support for various MIME types & analyzers, and robust querying including exact matches, wildcards, range queries, proximity searches, and more.Secondary Indexing: Secondary Indexing (2i) gives developers the ability, at write time, to tag an object stored in Riak with one or more queryable values.MapReduce: Developers can leverage MapReduce for analytic and aggregation tasks. It offers support for both JavaScript and Erlang MapReduce.
More Resources
You can learn more about Riak, Riak Enterprise, and Riak CS in our documentation and at Basho.com.