Riak 1.2 Officially Released | Hacker News Reader

Riak 1.2 Officially Released

basho.com

124 pointspharkmillups40 comments

Somewhat of a shameless plug here: Basho is having conference in October called RICON. It's in San Francisco, and it's two days dedicated to Riak, developers, and distributed systems in production. And there will be plenty of chatter about Riak 1.2 (and 1.3).

http://basho.com/community/ricon2012/

One thing that isn't highlighted much in the release notes or blog post (but will be once I get around to updating the docs) is the addition of the new 'replace' and 'force-replace' cluster commands in Riak 1.2.

Have a cluster A/B/C and want to replace A with an upgraded machine Z? Bring up Z and then: cluster join Z; cluster replace A Z; cluster plan/commit.

Have cluster A/B/C and C irreversibly crashes? Bring up node D from backups of C, and then: cluster join D, cluster force-replace C D, cluster plan/commit. Passive read-repair (or the newer repair logic) will resolve replicas missing from the backup.

Any chance on getting indicative pricing for Enterprise.

I generally hate hidden pricing and using products with it because it generally means the company attempts to charge whatever it can get away with and is afraid of having their clients find or what others are paying.

Honestly, this is a big turn off if you compare with Cassandra. While Cassandra has commercial options, all the functionality is at least built in.

The only thing you don't get is multi-site replication. They gotta pay the bills; cassandra gets its love from Facebook...

I agree with paying the bills, but if you opt for Riak to start and grow to need multi-site support, not even having a ballpark price can be an adoption turn off. Then again, prices which are too high can also be an adoption turn off :)

From the impression I get, if your growth is big enough that you need multi-site replication (I'm sure there are outlying cases where you are a small company and need multi-site replication, but those are very rare instances I would think) you're going to need more than just "something to install".

I think Basho has a ops guy that is tasked specifically with going to these Enterprise companies and helping them with the setup - multi-site replication most likely means there are hundreds or thousands of nodes being deployed and that type of thing is really complex and also tricky to do right (even with Riak, which makes it REALLY easy).

My feeling on the price issue is this: Riak is willing to work with their clients - if you need it, you're going to call them and they basically workout what it is you need and what they can provide (maybe it is just the multi-site addon, maybe it's that plus a ops guy that knows Riak in and out and can get you completely set up worry-free with full-time support).

we have more than one ops guy...we have a team that help with these scenarios.

And, I think you'd be surprised. Multi-site replication is a requirement for companies and applications both large and small.

What is the thing you can build with Riak Enterprise that you don't think you can build with just-plain-Riak?

WAN replication and their apparently awesome support are the differentiating factors I usually hear about.

You can get a support contract on the OSS version as well and just use what you pay for. If you need Multi-Site replication though, yes that's a EDS thing.

Don't forget though, if you are in a startup, we have Riak for Startups (http://basho.com/products/riak-enterprise-for-startups/) where you pay what you can.

I was under the impression that Basho specifically chose not to provide paid support for the OSS version. Were you speaking of other companies offering support, or is this a new thing?

What I was essentially saying was you can pay for EE for the support even if you weren't getting it for the multi-site ability.

ah. gotcha.

Primarily masterless, multi-site (WAN) replication. This is probably the only reason why I would choose Riak over some of their competition.

http://wiki.basho.com/Multi-Data-Center-Replication-Concepts...

The company I work for, Bump (http://bu.mp/company/), pays for Riak Enterprise. I am not going to disclose our particular pricing, though, except to say that this isn't a commodity. Every deal is going to be different, cover different things, so it's hard to give guidance on the subject.

What I will say, however, is that it has been worth it. Whenever we need Basho's support, they are on the line and ready to help us. Their staff has been excellent to us and I couldn't be happier about our relationship with those folks.

Whether it is sitting down and talking to them about some what-if scenarios, discussing optimizing our usage, or even reviewing configuration files before we spin up a new cluster -- they've been on the ball. We recently renewed our contract for another year and I can't imagine us not doing that as long as we still use Riak.

With the 1.2 release, the Riak Enterprise docs are public for the first time.

http://wiki.basho.com/Multi-Data-Center-Replication-Concepts...

Yay for FreeBSD support! I didn't like hacking on it to get it to install on FreeBSD... Also yay for LevelDB improvements :)

How is Riak different from Cassandra or HBase?

What might be the reasons I'd want to use Riak instead of open source alternatives?

can you guys update provide a non-/CURRENT/ link so I can bring over the homebrew formula?

Riak -> 1.2 -> 1.2.0 is also there.

Source tarball: http://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.basho.com/riak/1.2/1.2.0/r...

Go to http://basho.com/resources/downloads/, static links are available if you navigate down the tree to the individual files. e.g. http://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.basho.com/riak/1.2/1.2.0/o...

roger, it's in the main brew tree now

why does http://downloads.basho.com/ show different results than the above, for the record?

thanks for the nifty db >:3

http://downloads.basho.com is being phased out for the new downloads site. We left it up for now, but it will eventually be taken down.

Basho continues to rapidly add features and improve Riak. I think they're far ahead of the competition. Frankly, I think Riak is the undiscovered gem in the NoSQL space.

we're working on the 'undiscovered' part. :-)

How about a getting started page that is as easy as this one:

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-d...

Yes. Docs are high on our list of things to revamp. We should be refacing and improving in all areas starting right about now...

Look at this page (linked from Basho home page, titled "Learn More"): http://basho.com/products/riak-overview/

There's nothing on that page except useless talk and a chart. There are hundreds of other NOSQL highly distributed, available, blah blah blah databases. Why should I choose Riak? Why not MongoDB? CouchDB?

And I challenge you to find a link on that page that tells you anything more. All other links are just as bad: http://basho.com/technology/why-use-riak/ and http://basho.com/technology/architecture/ and http://basho.com/technology/technology-stack/ and http://basho.com/technology/technology-stack/ - The wiki is also not good at all: http://wiki.basho.com/Riak.html

They are just spec sheets and vague sentences. For God's sake, show me a sample project. A to-do app so I can get my head around all these new concepts...

It's been 6th or 7th time in the past year that I've stumbled upon your site and was mildly interested to know more about Riak, but the docs are so horrible that I know "nothing" about it.

I gave a (introductory) presentation (to an undergraduate class) about MongoDB after 10 hours of reading their site and "The Little MongoDB Book"[1] and hacking around with it (that's how good and thorough they explained their system). I'm not sure how much it would take for me to understand enough of Riak to explain it to someone.

That guy also wrote a decent "Little Book" on Redis, which I also found extremely compelling. Please, if you like your product and want to see more people use it, write a better documentation. Or hire Karl Seguin to write one for you!

[1]: http://openmymind.net/2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book/

[2]: http://openmymind.net/2012/1/23/The-Little-Redis-Book/

here are a couple docs you might find helpful.

http://riakhandbook.com

http://pragprog.com/book/rwdata/seven-databases-in-seven-wee... ...this has a section on Riak as well.

Thanks - The Riak Handbook seems very nice. But they don't count, you have to buy them :) These kind of docs should be free (to entice prospective users on getting started with your product as fast as possible).

fair enough....but both the above referenced docs were written by 3rd parties so they are not Basho's to give away. But your point is well-taken and a doc revamp is underway.

Unlike Mongo, which is a pin compatible architectural replacement for MySQL in most web app designs, you would probably never build a "to-do app" in Riak. Mongo is thus probably inherently easier to demo.

Moreover, if you just show someone the API for Riak and what it's capable of doing, you're not really giving them an appreciation of what Riak is about. To an application developer, Mongo's interface is probably much more congenial and full-featured.

I think there's a certain extent to which you either have the problem Riak solves and know why you'd want it, or you don't and no tutorial is going to change that. But that might just be an opportunity for a really creative tutorial.

This is a good comment. I first got excited about Riak because I'm an Erlang programmer (hence why I knew about it) and tried to build a side-project web app using it; only to realize Riak is poorly suited for the type of task where you need anything remotely resembling the relational model (and all of the tools that come with it).

It hasn't been until two years later that I've actually found a need for it - it handles very specific pieces of our data model that grow rapidly and doesn't need to be queried or indexed in any complex manner. We still use a relational database for user records, profile records, transaction records, etc...

Riak's documentation is horrible. It reads like a whitepaper; spending more time explaining how Riak is built than explaining how to build something with Riak. It's suitable when all you care about are early adopters, but will put off everyone else.

Trying to understand Riak by its documentation is like trying to understand Redis by reading up on ziplists.

Edit:

I'm the author of the two Little books mentioned above. I have no doubt that Riak's documentation can be much more approachable. (and I have a love-hate relationship with writing and would never write for money, so you can't hire me, if you were so inclined)

Can I beg you to write a little book on Riak then? I'm not a basho employee, I just hate their documentation every bit as much as you do for the same reasons.

Your "little" series is a boon to humanity man :(

Indeed. I'm glad to know that. Mind you, nothing in the home page or in the first pages of the wiki to give such an impression. When you read them, you get the feeling that Riak is yet another NOSQL database (which is absolutely fine - Mongo and Couch and Redis and tens of other NOSQL dbs all solve slightly different problems and have different characteristics and use different parts of CAP), so it's frustrating no to be represented with a simple tutorial and instead, being lectured on how Riak is built (which is slightly different that "how would you use it").

Now that I know Riak is a different NOSQL db, next time I'll spend more time reading the docs.

Thanks.

The wiki (http://wiki.basho.com/Riak.html) is actually really good. I've been spending a lot of time on http://wiki.basho.com/Operations.html, http://wiki.basho.com/Concepts.html, and their sub-pages today.

The navigation could be improved, though. For instance, on the Concepts page I linked to above it isn't obvious that I'm on an overview page and that each link on the left (buckets, clusters, replications, etc.) leads to another more detailed page rather than a section of the current page.

you mean like this? http://wiki.basho.com/Installation.html

That's a link to page that shows you how to start the server and ping it. There's more to getting started than that.

In contrast, Mongos docs are superb IMO.

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