Wrap-Up

Riak is the first NoSQL style database we’ve covered. It is a distributed, data-replicating, enhanced key-value store without a single point of failure.

If your experience with databases until now has been only relational, Riak may seem like an alien beast. There are no transactions, no SQL, no schema. There are keys, but linking between buckets is not at all like a table join, and mapreduce can be a daunting methodology to grok.

The trade-offs, however, are worth it for a certain class of problems. Riak’s ability to scale out with more servers (rather than scale up with larger single servers) and its ease of use are excellent attempts at solving the unique scalability problems of the Web. And rather than reinventing the wheel, Riak ...

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