Riak clustered NoSQL database adds official FreeBSD support

The latest major update to Riak – Basho's open source clustered NoSQL database – adds official support for FreeBSD and features new approaches to cluster management. In version 1.2 of the highly scalable distributed database, developers can stage and review multiple cluster changes to see how they affect the system before committing them; this is especially useful for cancelling changes or delaying them until off-peak hours.

Riak 1.2 replaces Basho's custom code for storing and calculating statistics with the open source folsom Erlang-based metrics system library; the developers say that the new library should should greatly improve the statistics performance. A new anti-entropy mechanism has been introduced which can be used to rebuild a partition for KV or Search from the Riak Console. In the past, users could only repair this data by listing keys and using read repair.

Other changes include updates to the "riak-admin transfers" command which provides more details about the status of active transfers, and MapReduce and LevelDB performance improvements. The team at Basho also notes that upgrading to new versions after 1.2 should be even easier as it now has built-in capability negotiation, which automatically determines features that are supported by all nodes; previously users had to manually check and disable new features before upgrading Riak across their nodes and then re-enabling these.

The commercial Enterprise edition of Riak has also received several enhancements. These include support for SSL encryption and NAT, improvements to load balancing, and finer control of replication across multiple data centres for better stability and performance.

More details about the new version, including a full list of new features, can be found in the announcement blog post and in the release notes. Riak 1.2 is available to download as source code and as binary packages for Fedora, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6, SmartOS, Solaris and Ubuntu; other open source Riak resources are also available on the Basho Community site. Hosted on GitHub, Riak is licensed under the Apache Licence 2.0.

See also:

• Basho announces cloud storage version of Riak, a report from The H.
• Clustered NoSQL database Riak gets administration console, a report from The H.

(crve)