News

NoSQL Database Targets Internet of Things Development

• By David Ramel
• October 20, 2015

Basho Technologies Inc. is targeting Internet of Things (IoT) development with a new NoSQL database offering, optimized to handle time series data sources.

Riak TS is "a distributed NoSQL database architected to aggregate and analyze massive amounts of sequenced, unstructured data generated from the IoT and other time series data sources," the company said in a statement. "Riak TS is optimized to deliver reliable and scalable reads and writes at unmatched speeds, so organizations can effectively meet their application time series data storage and retrieval needs."

The new offering is being added to the company's stable of Big Data-oriented database products, combined as the Basho Data Platform. It comprises Riak KV, a NoSQL database featuring a key/value design, and Riak S2, a cloud-based large object storage product.

Riak TS, also based on a key/value design, is optimized to store and retrieve tremendous quantities of time series data generated by networked systems, devices and sensors.

It features APIs and client libraries for coding in Java, Ruby, Python, Go, Erlang, Node.js or the Microsoft .NET Framework. It scales as needed, the company said, adding cluster nodes without sharding, instead distributing data uniformly across clusters. It uses SQL-like queries to work with data and integrated with the popular Apache Spark technology for easier and faster time series data analytics.

Time series data, the company said, is any data delineated through the use of timestamps, and it often requires higher write load performance than traditional key/value use cases. For efficiency, it needs to be co-located on the same physical storage or virtual node. "Time series data is often collected at frequent intervals which may not be relevant as data ages," the company's site explains. "The data will often be rolled up, compressed and the granular details expired."

While Riak provides open source versions of Riak KV and Riak S2, with enhanced and supported enterprise versions available, the company doesn't offer an open source version of Riak TS, and hadn't responded to a question about pricing at press time.