The awesome dudes at Basho released Riak 0.13 and with it their first version of Riak Search yesterday. This is all kinds of exciting, and I’ll tell you why. Riak Search is (way down below) based on Lucene, both the library and the query interface. It mimicks the Solr web API for querying and indexing. Just like you’d expect something coming out of Basho, you can add and remove nodes at any time, scaling up and down as you go. I’ve seen an introduction on the basics back at Berlin Buzzwords, and it was already shaping up to be nothing but impressive. But enough with all the praise, why’s this stuff exciting?
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The key/value model is quite restrictive when it comes to fetching data by, well anything else than a key. Keeping reverse lookup indexes was one way to do it, but the consistency model of Riak made it hard if not impossible to maintain a consistent list of interesting entries in an atomic way.
Riak Search fills this gap (and not only for Riak, the key/value store, but for any key/value store if you will) by offering something that scales up and down in the same way as Riak, so you don’t have to resort to e.g. Redis to maintain reverse lookup indexes.
Run queries in any way you can think of, fetch ranges, groups, you name it, no need to do anything really. It even integrates directly with Riak through pre-commit hooks.
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It’s based on proven technology (Lucene, that is). It doesn’t compete with something entirely new, it takes what’s been worked on and constantly improved for quite a while now, and raises it onto a new foundation to make it scale much nicer, the foundation being Riak Core, Riak KV and Bitcasks, and some new components developed at Basho.
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It uses existing interfaces. Imagine just pointing your search indexing library to a new end point, and there you go. Just the thought of that makes me teary. Reindex data, reconfigure your clients to point to a new endpoint, boom, there’s your nicely scalable search index.
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Scaling Solr used to be awkward. Version 1.5 will include some heavy improvements, but I believe the word shard fell at some point. Imagine a Solr search index where you can add and remove nodes at any time, the indexing rebalancing without requiring manual intervention.
Sound good? Yeah, Riak Search can do that too.
Remember though, it’s just a first release, which will be improved over time. I for one am just happy they finally released it, I almost crapped my pants, it’s that exciting to have something like Riak Search around. And I say that with all honesty and no fanboyism whatsoever. Having used Solr quite a lot in the past I’m well aware of its strengths and weaknesses and the sweet spot Riak Search hits.
I urge you to play with it. Installing it and feeding it with data could not be easier. Well done, Basho!
Update: From reading all this you may get the impression that Riak Search builds heavily on a Lucene foundation. That’s not the case. When I say that it builds on top of Lucene, I actually meant that it can and does reuse its analyzers and query parsing. Both can be replaced with custom (Erlang) implementations. That’s the only part of Lucene that is actually used by Riak Search, because why reinvent the wheel?