[bfrog]

This could make riak actually useful to the masses as a fine database! Certainly one of my biggest beefs with riak was the overly difficult interface it has and its lack of secondary indexes.

The choice of protocol buffers as the serialization format is also kind of weak imho. There are some really piss poor protobuf implementations that are slower than serializing to xml or json. The python version especially comes to mind.

[bradfordw]

Sorry, I'm going to make an assumption that by interface difficulty you mean it's ability to be queried (map reduce only + lucene {optional})? Also, nothing forces you to use protobuffs, you can tell riak what (via the content type of an http header) what your data is and get it back as such. I don't see that as a weakness.