Querying Riak Just Got Easier - Introducing Secondary Indices

This session introduces new Riak KV functionality called Secondary Indices. Secondary Indices allows a developer to retrieve Riak objects using a SQL-style query language that matches compound criteria against an object’s properties.

Currently, a developer coding outside of Riak’s key/value based access must maintain their own indexes into the data using links, other Riak objects, or external systems. This is straightforward for simple use cases, but can add substantial coding and data modeling for complex applications. By formalizing an approach and building index support directly into Riak KV, we remove this burden from the application developer while preserving Riak’s core benefits, including scalability and tolerance against hardware failure and network partitions.

The talk will cover usage, capabilities, limitations, and lessons learned.