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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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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