Phoenix Framework with Riak

[OvermindDL1]

@schaary

When you want to use a database like Redis or Riak you should be aware that you have to do everything on your own. A simple example is user management. In a RDB you have a users table which you can ask for a single entry by username or by id or by whatever. In Redis you could store the user entry in a hash - let’s say users:1, where users is something like the name of the “table” and the number 1 after the colon is the user-id. So, if you want the user with the id 123 you pick users:123 and you are done in O(1). But you can’t search in a Redis-hash. If you want to search by username or by email address, you have to build the indexes by your own. If you search for the username foo, such a index could be a Redis-string with key username:foo and the value is the user-id.

Actually Riak has secondary indexes built in, they are part of the metadata that you can add to a row, at least the last time I used it, which was… oy probably a decade ago, I’m assuming Riak has developed even further since then, I just use PostgreSQL nowadays, I’ve not had a need for an untold monstrous amount of data munging needed that would make something like Riak shine and at the scales I work (~1tb/data) PostgreSQL well outperforms it.

@bmalum

I have worked a lot with Redis while i was developing in Ruby and RoR, do you know the feeling when you would like to start something new?

Also Redis is pretty worthless, especially if you have PostgreSQL, as PostgreSQL can do everything Redis can do, and better, and can do a whole lot more!

@sashaafm

You were saying you can’t find example code for the Riak adapter but isn’t the purpose of Ecto to be like an interface for the DB? You should be able to use the Riak adapter just by calling Ecto functions and all that like when using it for Postgres, no?

Also, Riak is natively erlang, you can make native calls, though those are documented as breakable between versions and you have to run in-node, but even the client calls are utterly trivial.

Ecto is built more for relational DB’s, for things like Riak, which is more of a KV-Store + Secondary Indexes + FileStorage + Concurrent MapReduce + plus plus plus, well Riak is an entirely different beast.

@epailty

No commits since June 17 2016

So I’d need to fork it and maintain it myself…

I am wondering, is it a better idea to call Riak directly using :ectoc ?
(Riak is different to PostgreSQL after all).

Now an up to date post. ^.^
I’d call Riak’s Client directly if you want to make an ecto interface. Also, Ecto2 made a huge paradigm shift, it will be mostly if not entirely a rewrite, I’d probably just rewrite.

@xlphs

I was just playing with GitHub - drewkerrigan/riak-elixir-client: A Riak client written in Elixir. last night and found it to be acceptable, although documentation is rather poor, like mysterious. But then again I suppose you can always call the erlang riak directly and maybe that’s what people usually do. Just my 2 cents.

Jut call the erlang client, the elixir one is probably just a thin wrapper around it anyway and erlang is native in elixir since they are just different syntaxes on the same core.

@xlphs

Did you choose Riak because of distributed storage or some other reason?

I’m curious of this. In my testing Riak is only suited for utterly massive read-writes and distributed mapreduce, potentially as a KV file storage as well. These are not use-cases I’ve had as of yet that PostgreSQL’s been unable to fulfill for me yet.