Riak Revisited (Changelog Interviews #40)

Wynn sat down with Andy Gross and Mark Phillips of Basho and John Nunemaker of Ordered List to talk about Riak, Riak Search, and moving an open source community to GitHub.

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Featuring:

• John Nunemaker – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• NoSQL smackdown, live from SXSW 2010.
• Are you web scale?
• Drop us a ping@thechangelog.com and let us know who you want to get on The Changelog
• Andy Gross VP of Engineering at Basho, the company behind Riak.
• Mark Phillips Community Manager at Basho AKA * @pharkmillups
• John Nunemaker of Ordered List and MongoMapper fame
• Riak is now available as a binary download
• Bitcask, the new backend for Riak
• Riak key value store, decentralized datastore from Basho Technologies
• Riak Search, full-text search engine based on Riak
• Riak buckets, container and keyspace for data stored in Riak
• Riak KVS buckets can be automatically searchable by installing the Search pre-commit hook
• Riak supports an Apache SOLR interface
• Sean Cribbs made some waves with Ripple
• Ruby, Python, Node.js are the biggest adopters of Riak
• Riak aims to scale both up and down. Adding a node adds a linear increase in throughput and storage capacity. 50 nodes run easily on a laptop.
• Riak nodes are truly decentralized, no node is special
• Riak compares to Cassandra and Voldemort
• Riak has built-in JavaScript map reduce but unlike Couch, it’s more an ad hoc approach.
• Andy explains Riak’s link walking or bucket-key-tag relationships between objects.
• Riak now has two interfaces, the original REST HTTP interface, and a new protocol buffers interface, a faster binary interface
• Eric Brewer, a Basho board member, and his cap theorem
• Bitcask is an append-only file format where the keys are stored in memory for ultra fast lookups.
• InnoStore, the original Riak backend
• John Muellerleile, author of the popular NoSQL cartoon about distributed map reduce in Erlang
• Apache Lucene query syntax a growing standard for search
• The move from BitBucket to GitHub was ultimately about community, not about DVCS
• The THANKS file lists many Riak community contributors
• Harmony - the MongoDB-powered hosted CMS from Ordered List
• Mozilla runs several Riak clusters to log data from their Test Pilot project
• Francisco Treacy uses Riak in WideScript, “an innovative app that helps you focus and interact with your texts — on your desktop, your couch or on the go.”
• Inagist recently moved from Cassandra to Riak
• Riak has partnered with Joyent and Node creator Ryan Dahl to create Riak SmartMachines
• Mark also is a fan of Redis
• Scala and Clojure have Andy excited, too.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!