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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
http://basho.com/community/ricon2012/