Will’s Tech Talk this week is on Riak. “Riak is an open source, highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed database.” – Riak Overview on Basho.com.

The main use-case is to use in web applications that have heavy requirements for data, where lots of data must be “written” or “read” in a distributed fashion, but needs to be high-availability.

Will also went over one of the main Ruby libraries named ripple that is a rich Ruby modeling layer for Riak, Basho’s distributed database that contains an ActiveModel-based document abstraction.

Riak works great when your database gets painful. If you have an application that just has tons of writes, or tons of reads happening, and the database is just dragging, Riak is a great choice for storing and reading data quickly. Adding Riak along-side your database to alleviate performance is a great way to scale out and make your web application more performant.

Check out the video on our Tech Talks page: http://vimeo.com/highgroove/videos