the window merge is a new thing in riak 0.14, i believe. and you are correct the merge is only a consideration based on your use case. if you are using riak as

the window merge is a new thing in riak 0.14, i believe. and you are correct the merge is only a consideration based on your use case. if you are using riak as a pure dump of immutable data you will not need to merge. if, however, your use case consists of a number of edits you should consider a more aggressive merge strategy. As all updates/deletes are appended to bitcask and are actually writes, your dead bytes will start growing rapidly.