Wrap Your SQL Head Around Riak & MapReduce

"NoSQL is awesome! I need to use it on my next project!" ... [hours later] ... "How the heck do I get my data out of this thing?!"

Sound familiar? Non-relational data storage solutions (NoSQL) promise all kinds of benefits -- scalability, flexibility, fault-tolerance -- but (by the nature of the moniker) don't have SQL to query with. Riak is one such solution, a distributed key-value store that implements MapReduce for querying, and has some awesome client libraries for Javascript and Node.js. We'll briefly discuss how MapReduce works and then dive into converting some pretty common SQL queries into their MapReduce equivalents, all using code you know how to write, Javascript!