Riak 1.1 Released

108 points by seancribbs 14 years ago | 26 comments

rb2k_ 14 years ago |

I love to go back to Riak every now and then and throw one of the bigger datasets I have sitting around at a single node using Ruby. It is one of the most interesting databases out there and it's a breeze to set up (especially when compared to Cassandra).

It is kind of a shame though. Riak has awesome features, but some of them (e.g. secondary indexes) are hard to use and documentation is somewhat missing.

If you look at the official clients page (http://wiki.basho.com/Client-Libraries.html#Ruby), you can see ripple (https://github.com/seancribbs/ripple) but the page doesn't mention riak-ruby-client (https://github.com/basho/riak-ruby-client) which was split from ripple some time ago.

In theory, both of them support secondary indexes as far as I can tell, but you won't find that feature in either readme. There are some specs available that somehow describe parts of it though. I still don't see clearly how I could search secondary indexes from either library.

The same goes for things like data vs raw_data and serializers (small discussion: https://github.com/basho/riak-ruby-client/pull/19). While there is a very informative screencast in Seans blog, there is no mention in the readme file.

jbellis 14 years ago | |

Curious what you found so hard about setting up Cassandra. Counterpoint: http://www.screenr.com/5G6

tolitius 14 years ago | | |

I agree. Setting up Cassandra is simple. It is later when you get to things like:

    mutator.setColumnOrSuperColumn( ... )
    mutationsMap = new HashMap<ByteBuffer, Map<String, List<Mutation>>>()..

    compound column..
    super compound family of super columns...

where it feels more of a senior project, rather than something simple as:

    curl POST '{"red":2, "blue":4}' http://127.0.0.1:8091/riak/laundry/shirts

Although CQL fixes some of the problems with Cassandra complexity [Thrift does not even sound good in all 3 languages I know], I still believe it will be far more "desirable" (as the real http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra was) if more forces are applied to simplicity and polish.

rb2k_ 14 years ago | | |

It annoys the hell out of me that I can't launch the app by default because it points at directories that aren't user-writeable. Riak just has the etc and var directories inside the tarball. Cassandra just assumes that it is able to write to /var/...

Also: Setting up the Schema changes quite a bit since 0.7 and that was always kinda annoying. Nothing that is really that big of a problem, but it feels like I have to change the code every minor version since 0.7. (note that they didn't set up a schema in the screencast and the cluster that got started is pretty useless, isn't it?)

nirvana 14 years ago | |

Wait, can't you fix the wiki? You're right that its an oversight, but one you can fix yourself.

rb2k_ 14 years ago | | |

Sure, if I actually knew the correct solution...

Seeing as Basho is backing Riak, I would assume that they would invest a little bit of time documenting what they actually did :)

davidcollantes 14 years ago |

For those, like me, who do not know what Riak is:

"Riak is an open source, highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed database."

Source: http://basho.com/products/riak-overview/

ismarc 14 years ago | |

It also makes different trade-offs in usability of the software. It is (in my opinion) the most sysadmin friendly datastore, without hiding complexity, the tools are just pleasant to use. However, it has a larger curve for developers. We did a shootout to find a solution that would work for our needs and it came down to Mongo vs. Riak. We went with Mongo and are feeling the pain of getting everything automated and set up, but consider it a one-time cost rather than an "every time we get a new developer" cost.

wfarr 14 years ago | | |

Having worked with some quite large Mongo setups, I think you'll find the administration of Mongo ends up being significantly more than a single upfront cost.

Dealing with sharding + replica sets is an administrative nightmare with Mongo.

Ixiaus 14 years ago | |

It's a distributed multi-node key-value store. They built it using Erlang (I almost consider that, alone, a "feature").

firefoxman1 14 years ago | | |

Yeah, it's important to note that it's a key-value store; that's what attracted me initially.

gry 14 years ago | | |

Based off Amazon's Dynamo work (think S3).

nirvana 14 years ago | | |

If it claims to be distributed and its not written in erlang, don't use it.

Well, that's the filter I use when looking at anything. If its not written in erlang I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how it isn't really actually a distributed system. Usually I find out that it isn't.

rb2k_ 14 years ago |

Oh yay, I wonder how enabling Snappy on LevelDB changes the performance characteristics.

I really liked the introduction of Snappy to CouchDB, especially for EC2 machines with their usually slow IO

ahi 14 years ago |

I want to love Riak, but the documentation is a mess. At least the 'Fast Track' is out of date and inconsistent: http://wiki.basho.com/Building-a-Development-Environment.htm...

nirvana 14 years ago |

Glad to see Basho putting out new releases at such a clip. I'm envious, frankly.

It is really impressive how far Riak has come in the last year.

I don't think anything compares to it, and I think it should have an order of magnitude more interest and users. (I think people just get scared off by "erlang", which is silly.)

no-espam 14 years ago | |

how much does riak pay you?

jsavimbi 14 years ago |

I'm very interested in seeing the new Admin console; is there a URL for that. Finding the docs a little light.

cmeiklejohn 14 years ago | |

You can see a demo from Mark here:

http://basho.com/blog/technical/2012/01/30/Riak-in-Productio...

jsavimbi 14 years ago | | |

Looks great. And reassuring. I just followed the instructions and restarted. https://github.com/basho/riak_control