Riak install guide

riak.txt

Install guide:
http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/tutorials/installation/Installing-on-Debian-and-Ubuntu/

Note: If you dont build from source (if you use the easy way: 'sudo dpkg -i riak_1.2.1-1_i386.deb') then you wont be able to setup a 4 node cluster with Rebar.

Dependencies for 32bit ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5-dev m4 
sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8

-------- Thoughts ---------
Map Reduce queries are slow and not for realtime queries.

Everything done with HTTP. Sample code uses Curl extensively:
http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/tutorials/fast-track/Loading-Data-and-Running-MapReduce-Queries/

Has Cassandra-style 'specify number of nodes to write / read from' but tends to sync nodes in milliseconds not minutes like Cassandra.

Riak is close to a graph database. 

Link-Walking allows you to walk thru the graph via links to keys to other objects. These links have to be setup for each document inserted to the DB. 
This allows a complex join-style query to be done with 1 request rather than multiple queries like Redis / Mongo.