Bucket Types

Buckets are essentially a flat namespace in Riak. They allow the same key name to exist in multiple buckets and enable you to apply configurations across keys.

How Many Buckets Can I Have?

Buckets come with virtually no cost except for when you modify the default bucket properties. Modified bucket properties are gossiped around the cluster and therefore add to the amount of data sent around the network. In other words, buckets using the default bucket type are free. More on that in the next section.

In Riak versions 2.0 and later, Riak suggests that you use bucket types to namespace and configure all buckets you use. Bucket types have a lower overhead within the cluster than the default bucket namespace but require an additional setup step on the command line.

Creating a Bucket Type

When creating a new bucket type, you can create a bucket type without any properties and set individual buckets to be indexed. The step below creates and activates the bucket type:

riak-admin bucket-type create animals '{"props":{}}'
riak-admin bucket-type activate animals

And this step applies the index to the cats bucket, which bears the animals bucket type we just created and activated:

curl -XPUT $RIAK_HOST/types/animals/buckets/cats/props \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"props":{"search_index":"famous"}}'

Another possibility is to set the search_index as a default property of the bucket type. This means any bucket under that type will inherit that setting and have its values indexed.

riak-admin bucket-type create animals '{"props":{"search_index":"famous"}}'
riak-admin bucket-type activate animals