I enjoyed working on Riak for an internship project I did but I would say that if you are not familiar with using map reduce heavily for querying that you facto

I enjoyed working on Riak for an internship project I did but I would say that if you are not familiar with using map reduce heavily for querying that you factor that into the amount of time you are going to spend to get Riak up and running. I don't know much this Riak search will impact things but I was storing data in JSON and ended up using a lot of time debugging MR queries because I didn't quite grok some of the finer points such as idempotence. The big company/small company thing isn't a big deal. I work for a very small company and we were able to get the free version going pretty painlessly.