Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apache Ignite VS RocksDB

Compare Apache Ignite VS RocksDB and see what are their differences

Apache Ignite logo Apache Ignite

high-performance, integrated and distributed in-memory platform for computing and transacting on...

RocksDB logo RocksDB

A persistent key-value store for fast storage environments
  • Apache Ignite Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-08
  • RocksDB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-12

Apache Ignite features and specs

  • In-Memory Data Grid
    Apache Ignite provides a robust in-memory data grid that can drastically improve data access speeds by storing data in memory across distributed nodes.
  • Scalability
    The system is designed to scale horizontally, allowing users to add more nodes to handle increased loads, thereby ensuring high availability and performance.
  • Distributed Compute Capabilities
    Ignite supports parallel execution of tasks across cluster nodes, which is beneficial for complex computations and real-time processing.
  • Persistence
    Although primarily in-memory, Ignite offers a durable and transactional Persistence layer that ensures data can be persisted on disk, providing a hybrid in-memory and persistent storage solution.
  • SQL Queries
    Ignite offers support for ANSI-99 SQL, which allows users to execute complex SQL queries across distributed datasets easily.
  • Integration
    It integrates well with existing Hadoop and Spark setups, allowing users to enhance their existing data pipelines with Ignite’s capabilities.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Apache Ignite includes built-in mechanisms for recovery and ensures that data copies are maintained across nodes for resilience against node failures.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Ignite

  • Complexity
    Apache Ignite can be complex to set up and manage, especially when configuring a large, distributed system with multiple nodes.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running an in-memory data grid like Ignite requires significant memory resources, which can increase operational costs.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its comprehensive features and distributed nature, there is a steep learning curve associated with effectively utilizing Ignite.
  • Configuration Overhead
    There is substantial configuration overhead involved to optimize performance and ensure proper cluster management.
  • Community Support
    Although it has active development, the community support might not be as robust compared to other more mature solutions, possibly leading to challenges in finding solutions to niche issues.
  • YARN Dependence
    For those looking to integrate with Hadoop, Ignite's optimal performance is sometimes reliant on Hadoop YARN, which can introduce additional complexity.

RocksDB features and specs

  • High Performance
    RocksDB is designed for high throughput and low latency, making it suitable for performance-intensive applications. It optimizes for fast read and write operations, leveraging the LSM-tree data structure.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Includes advanced features like transactions, column families, data compression, and support for various storage engines, providing flexibility for developers to tailor it to their needs.
  • Scale and Efficiency
    Handles large volumes of data efficiently, making it suitable for applications that require significant scalability. It does this by using efficient memory and disk utilization techniques.
  • Embedded Database
    As an embedded database, it allows applications to integrate storage capabilities directly into their processes, reducing the overhead associated with connecting to a separate database service.
  • Strong Community and Support
    Developed by Facebook, RocksDB has a strong community with extensive documentation, regular updates, and active development, ensuring continuous improvement and support.

Possible disadvantages of RocksDB

  • Complex Configuration and Tuning
    RocksDB is highly configurable, which can be a double-edged sword. Properly tuning parameters for optimal performance can be complex and requires a deep understanding of the internals.
  • Limited SQL Support
    RocksDB is a key-value store and does not support SQL out of the box. This may require additional layers or integration with other systems like MySQL or MariaDB to provide SQL capabilities.
  • Memory Usage
    Performance optimizations often involve significant memory usage, which could be a limitation in environments where memory resources are constrained.
  • Lack of Built-in Replication
    While RocksDB itself does not provide built-in replication capabilities, external tools or custom solutions are necessary to achieve data replication and high availability.
  • Learning Curve
    The complexity and rich feature set of RocksDB come with a steep learning curve, especially for developers unfamiliar with LSM-tree data structures and database internals.

Apache Ignite videos

Best Practices for a Microservices Architecture on Apache Ignite

More videos:

  • Review - Apache Ignite + GridGain powering up banks and financial institutions with distributed systems

RocksDB videos

How Online Backup works in MyRocks and RocksDB

More videos:

  • Review - RocksDB Meetup 2020 at Rockset
  • Review - TokuDB vs RocksDB

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Ignite and RocksDB)
Databases
74 74%
26% 26
NoSQL Databases
76 76%
24% 24
Key-Value Database
73 73%
27% 27
Relational Databases
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Apache Ignite and RocksDB. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, RocksDB should be more popular than Apache Ignite. It has been mentiond 13 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache Ignite mentions (3)

  • API Caching: Techniques for Better Performance
    Apache Ignite — Free and open-source, Apache Ignite is a horizontally scalable key-value cache store system with a robust multi-model database that powers APIs to compute distributed data. Ignite provides a security system that can authenticate users' credentials on the server. It can also be used for system workload acceleration, real-time data processing, analytics, and as a graph-centric programming model. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Ask HN: P2P Databases?
    Ignite works as you describe: https://ignite.apache.org/ I wouldn't really recommend this approach, I would think more in terms of subscriptions and topics and less of a 'database'. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
  • .NET and Apache Ignite: Testing Cache and SQL API features — Part I
    Last days, I started using Apache Ignite as a cache strategy for some applications. Apache Ignite is an open-source In-Memory Data Grid, distributed database, caching, and high-performance computing platform. Source: over 3 years ago

RocksDB mentions (13)

  • Introducing Gridstore: Qdrant's Custom Key-Value Store
    When we started building Qdrant, we needed to pick something ready for the task. So we chose RocksDB as our embedded key-value store. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • The Home Server Journey - 4: Enter The Matrix
    One thing you should know is that the K8s architecture is optimized for stateless applications, which don't store changing information within themselves and whose output depend solely on input from the user or auxiliary processes. Conduit, on the contrary, is tightly coupled with its high-performance database, RocksDB, and has stateful behavior. That's why we need to take extra care by not replicating our process... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • How to choose the right type of database
    RocksDB: A high-performance embedded database optimized for multi-core CPUs and fast storage like SSDs. Its use of a log-structured merge-tree (LSM tree) makes it suitable for applications requiring high throughput and efficient storage, such as streaming data processing. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Fast persistent recoverable log and key-value store
    [RocksDB](https://rocksdb.org/) isn’t a distributed storage system, fwiw. It’s an embedded KV engine similar to LevelDB, LMDB, or really sqlite (though that’s full SQL, not just KV). - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • The Hallucinated Rows Incident
    To output the top 3 rocks, our engine has to first store all the rocks in some sorted way. To do this, we of course picked RocksDB, an embedded lexicographically sorted key-value store, which acts as the sorting operation's persistent state. In our RocksDB state, the diffs are keyed by the value of weight, and since RocksDB is sorted, our stored diffs are automatically sorted by their weight. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Ignite and RocksDB, you can also consider the following products

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.

memcached - High-performance, distributed memory object caching system

Hazelcast - Clustering and highly scalable data distribution platform for Java

Aerospike - Aerospike is a high-performing NoSQL database supporting high transaction volumes with low latency.

KeyDB - KeyDB is fast NoSQL database with full compatibility for Redis APIs, clients, and modules.