

Why I Am Excited about Riak Search - pharkmillups
http://blog.basho.com/2010/10/20/why-i-am-excited-about-riak-search/

======
siculars
I gave two talks[1] on Riak in NYC this month and one of the main points tht I
tried to stress was that Riak is more than a monolithic persistent data store.
Riak is actually a very well thought out federation of independant code
modules.

This had not always been as evident when looking at earlier releases of the
source. Over time what became clear is tht Basho was refactoring their code to
allow for interesting combinations and enhancemnts over their standard
offering. As the OP points out, the recent modularization of riak_core has
unleashed a wave of potential within the Riak ecosystem as recently manifested
in the form of Riak Search.

I'm am certain this design approach of code modularization will prove
immensely valuable as Riak continues to mature.

[1][http://www.slideshare.net/siculars/adding-riak-to-your-
nosql...](http://www.slideshare.net/siculars/adding-riak-to-your-nosql-bag-of-
tricks)

------
ericflo
Riak Search is a great example of the result of getting the fundamentals right
up-front, proving and improving them in a concrete product (Riak), and then
extracting the best bits into a reusable library (Riak Core).

The way they've done this matches my own philosophy on how this stuff should
be done.

Not to mention that Riak Search is very cool in and of itself.

------
roder
_Riak Search is the first public demonstration that Riak Core is a meaningful
base on which to build distributed systems beyond just a key/value store. By
using the same central code base for distribution, dispatch, ownership,
failure management, and node administration, we are able to confidently make
many of the same guarantees for Search that we have made all along for Riak's
key/value storage. Even if Search itself wasn't such a compelling product, it
is exciting as a proof of the value of Riak Core_

Riak Core can abstract away the difficulties of decentralized computing is
really exciting to me as well. It's a decentralized message queue or apache
zookeeper written in Erlang.

I really think the basho team has done an amazing job modularizing the
components Riak is comprised of (core, kv, search, etc) to make all bits
really re-usable. Well done Basho!

------
jeffreymcmanus
It's great that they're adding this (full-text search is one of the big
missing features from most NoSQL products), but I wonder why it wouldn't make
more sense to just provide great integration into one of the existing
dedicated search services like Sphinx?

~~~
nl
No, because they want it to _be_ one of those dedicated search products like
Sphinx.

At the moment, there are two main open source products people look at when
they implement full text search: Sphinx and Lucene/Solr.

I'm not a Sphinx expert, but I know Lucene/Solr quite well. One feature Solr
is currently working on is called Solr Cloud
(<http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrCloud>), which is a Zookeeper co-ordinated
clustered Solr implementation, which should make it a lot easier to
automatically resize your Solr cluster depending on usage. (At the moment you
can do this, but it requires rsync scripts etc etc, and is kind of messy).

It looks to me like Riak Search is aiming for this market, which I think is a
good strategy. (Note that Solr is often used as a NoSQL database, so in that
way Riak & Solr are direct competitors)

