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Riak 0.7 Release Notes

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- The Riak source tree has undergone a major restructuring as part of a

transition to a new build tool -- rebar. This tool enforces OTP compliant

directory structures for the riak application and its dependencies and

provides an easy-to-use wrapper around the new reltool system available in

Erlang R1303+. Using reltool makes it possible to construct a standalone

server instance that can be used on machines without Erlang installed. This

transition has also enabled us to introduce a standardized script for

starting/stopping and other server management tasks.

You can watch a screencast on Riak and Rebar here:

http://blog.basho.com/2009/12/17/basho-screencast---dave-smith-introduces-riak-in-an-embedded-node/

- In addition to the existing Client:list_keys function, there is now also

a Client:stream_list_keys function that provides the keys in a bucket over a

series of messages instead of in a single list. This can be useful with

larger buckets. The messages will be of the form {ReqId,{keys,Res}} followed

by a single {ReqId, done} to notify the client that all keys have been sent.

- riak_vnode has undergone a complete rewrite to fix some handoff-related bugs

and to eliminate the need for a separate riak_vnode_sidekick process.

- riak_stat : Riak can now track basic internal statistics about how many

reads and writes happened, and with what latency, in the last minute.

Add {riak_stat, true} to your Riak config file to enable stat tracking, then

use riak_client:get_stats/1 to retrieve the latest stats.

- Setting the bucket property "allow_mult" to 'false' enables Riak's

automatic sibling resolution. Prior to this release, all resolution was

done at read time. With 0.7, sibling resolution is done at write time for

allow_mult=false buckets.

- In fixing a bug in filtered_preflist, we also made Riak's default ring

partition claiming function more explicitly evenly distributed in 0.7. The

function will attempt to to produce an "optimal" claim for the N-value set

by the "target_n_val" configuration parameter (3, by default).

- The latest version of Webmachine (http://webmachine.basho.com) has been

integrated into Riak, which increases HTTP/Jiak performance considerably.

- Jonathan Lee contributed a patch that causes any object metadata keys

beginning with "X-Riak-Meta" to be emitted as HTTP headers when using the

"raw" HTTP interface.

- Sean Cribbs refactored the Ruby client library to be more idiomatic and

maintainable.

- Jayson Baird contributed a new Python client that uses PyCURL when available.