Basho Technologies Inc., the company behind the development of the popular Riak NoSQL database, has just released a version designed explicitly for the Internet of Things.

Called Riak TS, or “Riak Time Series”, the database now stands alongside Riak S2, the cloud large-object store, and Riak KV, the key-value store, as storage options at the bottom of Basho’s platform.

Basho’s core services like replication and synchronization sit atop of those storage platforms, but Riak TS comes with enhanced read and write performance when storing and retrieving time series data. As with the other Riak options, Riak TS is compatible with a variety of tools for those who want to dig into their data, including Redis for low-latency read access, Spark for analytics and Solr to perform search.

Asked why it developed Riak TS, Basho points to research from Accenture Plc, which says the Internet of Things will add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030, providing new ways for companies to grow and boost their revenues. Basho says Riak TS is designed to provide the fast, reliable and scalable read and write performance that’s necessary to power enterprise applications in the Internet of Things. The best way to do this is by storing, querying and analyzing IoT data together, and that’s exactly what Riak TS does.

“The rise of unstructured data presents a significant opportunity for innovation. As a result, companies are demanding database solutions that are operationally easy and specifically optimized to handle this type of data,” explained Basho CEO Adam Wray.

Wray expanded on this further in an interview with The Register, pointing to the example of The Weather Company, one of Basho’s most important customers. The Weather Company handles around 20 terabytes of IoT data each day, and was previously forced to compromise by putting its data into a bog-standard relational database for lack of any better options.

“The sheer volume of time series data requires databases that can efficiently and reliably store and query time series data,” said Bryson Koehler, executive vice president and CIO, The Weather Company. “Riak TS delivers on this need and allows us to perform the associated queries and transactions on time series data, while maintaining high availability and scale.”

One alternative for companies with massive amounts of IoT data is to put their time series data into the Apache Cassandra database, which is also highly scalable. Unfortunately, Cassandra is much slower than Riak TS, and its columnar structure isn’t the most suitable way of handling time stamp data, Wray explained.

Basho will be attending the AWS re:Invent summit that kicks off today in Las Vegas, where it’ll be putting on its first public demonstration of Riak TS.

Image credit: jeferrb via pixabay.com