**January 02, 2013**

New to Riak? Thinking about using Riak instead of a relational database? Join Riak chief architect Andy Gross and director of product management Shanley Kane for an intro this Thursday (11am PT/2pm ET). In about 30 minutes, we’ll cover the basics of:

* Scalability benefits of Riak, including an examination of limitations around master/slave architectures and sharding, and what Riak does differently
* A look at the operational aspects of Riak and where they differ from relational approaches
* Riak’s data model and benefits for developers, as well as the tradeoffs and limitations of a key/value approach
* Migration considerations, including where to start when migrating existing apps
* Riak’s eventually consistent design
* Multi-site replication options in Riak

Register for the webcast [here](/RelationalToRiakJan3.html).

[Shanley](http://twitter.com/shanley)

[Andy](https://twitter.com/argv0)