Seven Databases in Seven Weeks

Riak Loves the Web

Riak speaks web better than any other database we’ll see in this book (though CouchDB is a close second). You query via URLs, headers, and verbs, and Riak returns assets and standard HTTP response codes.

Riak and cURL

Since the goal of this book is to investigate seven databases and their concepts, and not teach new programming languages, we try to avoid introducing new languages where possible. Riak supplies an HTTP REST interface, so we’re going to interact with it via the URL tool cURL. In production, you’ll almost always use a driver in your language of choice. Using cURL allows us to peek at the underlying API without resorting to a particular driver or programming language.

Riak is a great choice for datacenters like ...