Clustered NoSQL database Riak gets administration console

The Riak distributed database has been updated to version 1.1, and has a new administration console and diagnostic console. Riak creator Basho believes the changes in 1.1 make Riak the most scalable and stable NoSQL database available.

Riak Control is an open sourced monitoring application and allows administrators to view and control Riak clusters. Users can get a snapshot of the cluster health and drill down into nodes of the cluster or add, take down and remove nodes from a web browser. Riak Control was originally part of Basho's commercial Riak Enterprise Data Store (EDS) offering but the company decided to open source it as part of Riak 1.1 "to reinforce our commitment to the open source community", according to Don Rippert, Basho CEO.

Basho has also added a "proactive" diagnostic suite, Riaknostic, which can check for common configuration and runtime problems and recommend resolutions for any problems found. Riak 1.1 also incorporates better error logging and improves data resilience in large clusters. Other improvements include the enabling of Snappy (a Google compression algorithm) and the tuning of the compaction algorithm to reduce delays.

The commercial version, Riak EDS has also seen a number of enhancements, mainly around the issue of replication between multiple data centres, including a range of synchronisation options for specific use cases. Riak EDS also adds bucket-level replication for finer control of replication.

Further details and known issues in Riak 1.1 are listed in the release notes. Riak is available to download as binary packages for Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6, Fedora 16, Mac OS X and for Debian, and as source code (Navigate to Riak, 1.1 and then 1.1.0 to display the folder). Further open source Riak resources are also available. Riak is published under the Apache 2.0 licence.

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