While Cockroach has more emphasis on being globally consistent than Rethink (which has more emphasis on realtime), they are both distributed Master-Slave systems. So:
(1) RethinkDB got good reviews/patches on the Jepsen tests, the recent Cockroach review wasn't as successful (although I'm sure they'll get patches and performance up).
(2) The convenience of the realtime updates and developer community friendliness is going to win over (from a social perspective) the types of startups/teams that choose to roll their own not-locked-in all-open-source infrastructures that they deploy to clouds.
I'm pretty strongly opinionated on these things, I think Firebase and RethinkDB nailed it, and other contenders (in those spaces, whether a Master-Slave service or open source one) have hard fighting battles.
2. I've been using RethinkDB for years and I've never found a use for the realtime updates. I think the benefit of that is mostly limited to chat apps, realtime collaboration, etc.
It's all based on use case, I guess. I spent the early part of my programming career building ERP and Accounting type systems, where real time updates are not factored into any design.
However, of late, I have been working on collaborative type apps, including IoT device programming, and real time updating is not just a luxury, it is expected. Indeed we are seeing things like SSE (Server Send Events) etc. being incorporated in the latest browser specs to support this.
Granted, unless you are using frameworks like Meteor etc., there is still a lot of work to be done to ease the integration between back end server push and browser real time display. Websockets are great, but require a lot of tedious management at scale.
But the thing is - once you start down the path of realtime updated apps, possibilities open up, and you begin to wonder how you used to program without it. For me, it all started when I knocked together this [0] real time update of Hacker News as a weekend project using RethinkDB for push updates, and Vue.js as the front end...
Interesting, would you mind sharing more of what you are doing? Batch processing, or something? The category of "realtime collaboration" seems to be the broad catch-all that I'm thinking of (todo lists/trellos, chat apps/gitter, social networks/facebook, search apps/google, productivity suites/gDocs, recording apps/youtube, automation tools/IFFT), plus the hype around drones, IoT, ML, etc.
That would be excluding banking apps, reports, etc. could you expand on yours/other uses that don't benefit from live updates?
(1) RethinkDB got good reviews/patches on the Jepsen tests, the recent Cockroach review wasn't as successful (although I'm sure they'll get patches and performance up).
(2) The convenience of the realtime updates and developer community friendliness is going to win over (from a social perspective) the types of startups/teams that choose to roll their own not-locked-in all-open-source infrastructures that they deploy to clouds.
I'm pretty strongly opinionated on these things, I think Firebase and RethinkDB nailed it, and other contenders (in those spaces, whether a Master-Slave service or open source one) have hard fighting battles.