Riak, an open source NoSQL database based on Amazon.com’s Dynamo architecture, reached the 1.0 milestone today. Basho, the project’s sponsor, offers an commercial version of the database with enterprise support.

Like Apache CouchDB, Riak is written in Erlang and designed to handle easy replication across multiple data centers. Wikia, one of the most popular sites on the Web, uses Riak to replicate sessions across its three data centers.

It’s also designed to be quick and easy to use. That’s why Mozilla choose to use Riak instead of Cassandra or HBase for its Test Pilot project (though the organization does use HBase elsewhere). The database can be “queried” using JavaScript, and Basho rolled out an open source MapReduce framework for Riak called Riak Pipe earlier this year to make the system even more powerful. As part of the 1.0 release, Riak Pipe has come out of beta.

Here’s a list of features in Riak 1.0, according to an announcement from Basho:

• Secondary Indices – allows a developer to retrieve Riak objects using a simple query language that matches compound criteria against an object’s properties
• Riak Pipe – a new feature for higher-latency data processing; a new take on Map/Reduce style data processing
  Integration of Riak Search – the powerful search engine built for Riak is now tightly integrated with the core 1.0 package
• Lager – a new, simple and effective logging framework for Riak 1.0
• LevelDB Support – Riak 1.0 includes available support for the LevelDB storage engine, further increasing user choice in deploying Riak
• Administration Improvements – new tools make it easier to scale, manage and access a Riak cluster for developers and administrators

Other major Riak users include Comcast and Yammer.

Basho competes with 10gen, Couchbase, DataStax and other enterprise NoSQL vendors.

Services Angle

As noted, Riak already has some enterprise traction, despite having only just reaching its 1.0 release today. The fact that an already popular NoSQL product is only just reaching this milestone is a reminder that this space is still maturing.