RethinkDB is an open source distributed database, based on Node’s streaming model, built to store JSON documents and scale to multiple servers. Josh Kuhn gave this talk at Geekdom in San Francisco outlining how Rethink allows you to scale queries and make replication easy in the real time web environment.
Rethink started out by addressing some of the performance shortcomings of other NoSQL databases like MongoDB whilst being easy to set up with a clean and easy to navigate UI which makes sharding and replication easier to manage. Rethink is also positioned as a great database choice for flexible schemas requirements as well as being able to run analytics directly in Rethink if they are not too intensive in order to simplify things.
For further third party insight into using RethinkDB, Alex Cruikshank at Carbon Five wrote a blog post which gives an overall positive review including everything from installation and how it compares to other databases, ReQL, the query specification API which is implemented in all the supporting languages, insert and updates, complex queries and joins.
With the upcoming release of version 2.0, RethinkDB also today announced the introduction of support for using Tornado and EventMachine to perform asynchronous queries in the Python and Ruby client drivers which means that for realtime web, RethinkDB change feeds can be plugged in offering a full back end solution for pushing live updates to the front end.
