A Little Riak Book for LFE

About This Book

This is not an "install and follow along" guide. This is a "read and comprehend" guide. Don't feel compelled to have Riak, or even have a computer handy, when starting this book. You may feel like installing at some point, and if so, instructions can be found in the Riak docs.

In my opinion, the most important section of this book is the concepts chapter. If you already have a little knowledge it may start slow, but it picks up in a hurry. After laying the theoretical groundwork, we'll move onto helping developers use Riak, by learning how to query it and tinker with some settings. Finally, we'll go over the basic details that operators should know, such as how to set up a Riak cluster, configure some values, use optional tools, and more.

New in 2.0

Riak 2.0 represents a major shift in the capabilities and focus of Riak as a data store. Riak has always been primarily focused on operational simplicity, and that has not changed. But when it came to design decisions, operations were always given priority over the needs of developers. This is changing. With the launch of 2.0, we've added some features that developers have wanted to see for quite a while. Namely, the following:

• Strong Consistency. Riak is still Eventually Consistent, but now you have a choice. Riak is now the easiest to manage database for adjusting the spectrum smoothly between AP and CP... per bucket, no less.
• Better Search. The makers of Riak have improved search by leveraging the power of the Solr search engine. You now get all of the queryability of distributed Solr, without the hassle of manual indexing.
• Datatypes. Riak historically has provided storage flexibility by allowing the storage of any binary object. This is still the case, but you now have the option of storing distributed maps, sets, counters, and flags that automatically converge in the face of conflicts.
• Security. A long-standing request whose day has finally come. Native Group/User access controls.
• Bucket types. Now you can support unlimited custom bucket properties, without the overhead of the old gossip protocol.
• Ring Resizing. Finally! Where in the past you were limited to a fixed ring size, you now have the option to dynamically increase/decrease the number of vnodes in your cluster.
• Other improvements. We've also made many other improvements, like simplified configuration management (no more messing with app.config and vm.args), reduced sibling explosions (via a new logical clock called DVV), improved internal metadata sharing (reducing gossip chatter), better AAE, and more.

This book also includes a new chapter written by John Daily, to help guide developers to write productive applications with Riak. We hope you enjoy the new, improved, Not Quite So Little Riak Book.