Evaluating Riak Key Value Cluster for Big Data

NoSQL database has become an important alternative to traditional relational databases. Those databases are prepared by the management of large, continuously and variably changing data sets. They are widely used in cloud databases and distributed systems. With NoSQL databases, static schemes and many other restrictions are avoided. In the era of big data, such databases provide scalable high availability solutions. Their key-value feature allows fast retrieval of data and the ability to store a lot of it. There are many kinds of NoSQL databases with various performances. Therefore, comparing those different types of databases in terms of performance and verifying the relationship between performance and database type has become very important. In this paper, we test and evaluate the Riak key-value database for big data clusters using benchmark tools, where huge amounts of data are stored and retrieved in different sizes in a distributed database environment. Execution times of the NoSQL database over different types of workloads and different sizes of data are compared. The results show that the Riak key-value is stable in execution time for both small and large amounts of data, and the throughput performance increases as the number of threads increases.