RethinkDB was always one of my favorites, and I still use it to this day to perform more complex ad-hoc queries on data since it's fairly easy to chain a query together in Javascript from the web console. I'm glad to see that it's still alive, even if progress is slow.
RethinkDB was behind my first major software project at my first job, and it was so great to use it it has been hard to find an alternative database. Really happy that it’s still getting some development!
If 80 upvotes on a minor release post is any indication I'd say HN's love of Rethink is very much not a thing of the past. Glad you had a good experience, I helped right it back in the day.
Rethinkdb is a kind of perfect piece of program but never been in production. Meanwhile, I know some companies who still stuck with a single giant Mongo db that couldn't scale anymore. And of course a push for Mongo Atlas, smh.
I’d recommend checking out materialize.io for anyone who still has hopes for a reactive db. Is the only project I’ve seen with the ambition of rethink (besides ksqldb, which feels too caveat-ridden, although still interesting).
(Yes, rethink is still “alive”, but between the performance issues and death of the supporting company it’s probably not the wisest piece of tech to become wedded to)
Does materialize.io have a trigger system yet though? One of the great things about Rethink was that client libraries made it easy to have application code stream live changes over websocket etc. to a client.
Yes, we do! It's a little non-standard SQL syntax we added called TAIL. You write TAIL <viewname>, and you get changes pushed to you. You can see a video of me badly explaining it in [2]. You can also do the thing where you create a Kafka SINK of a view and have the system push this to Kafka rather than have a long-running open SQL connection. There's some fun stuff with TAIL AS OF (start the changes at a specific point in time) and TAIL WITH SNAPSHOT (run a SELECT query, and then begin the change stream transactionally with the time of that SELECT query) that you can read about in the docs[1].
It's a good question. In general we've found that it's hard to beat a purpose-built time-series database like TimescaleDB for time-series workloads, but I would also like to see a thorough comparison with Rethink. :-)
They have migrated to PostgreSQL due to performance issues.
> Unfortunately RethinkDB was a bit slow. It was fast enough for our needs at the time but as we grew we gave up waiting for its performance to be improved. We sponsored one improvement in an effort to help it scale with us but it wasn’t enough. We ended up abandoning it in favor of PostgreSQL.
It would be awesome to know if the other issues hey had have since been improved. RethinkDB has some great ideas and great ergonomics and I'd love to use it again.
Sadly it got a bit silent around it since the company shut down.
I used it for a product in 2015, pretty nice piece of software.
(Yes, rethink is still “alive”, but between the performance issues and death of the supporting company it’s probably not the wisest piece of tech to become wedded to)
[1] https://materialize.io/docs/sql/tail/
[2] https://youtu.be/9XTg09W5USM?t=2650
[1] https://www.timescale.com/
(I work at TimescaleDB.)
[1]https://github.com/kclay/rethink-scala
> Unfortunately RethinkDB was a bit slow. It was fast enough for our needs at the time but as we grew we gave up waiting for its performance to be improved. We sponsored one improvement in an effort to help it scale with us but it wasn’t enough. We ended up abandoning it in favor of PostgreSQL.
https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/
However, you could have a dedicated performance expert write a test suite early, before all your customers complain about it, and profile that.
It's rarely done because startups don't have an extra expert on staff who isn't shipping features.
A particular example is the global write mutex issues in MongoDB and the fractal engine for MySQL that took years (almost a decade?) to fix.
Source: DBA.