
RethinkDB 2.4.1 - gabor-boros
https://rethinkdb.com/blog/2.4.1-release
======
andrewmunsell
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.

~~~
dmitryminkovsky
Great query language. Fun to still see references to it every so often (for
example, saw this recently: [https://hapi.dev/api?v=20.0.0#response-
toolkit](https://hapi.dev/api?v=20.0.0#response-toolkit))

------
buildbot
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!

------
k__
Ah, RethinkDB, the former love of HN.

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.

~~~
jdoliner
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.

~~~
a012
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.

------
purplerabbit
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)

~~~
btown
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.

~~~
arjunnarayan
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].

[1]
[https://materialize.io/docs/sql/tail/](https://materialize.io/docs/sql/tail/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/9XTg09W5USM?t=2650](https://youtu.be/9XTg09W5USM?t=2650)

------
nodesocket
Would be interesting to compare this RethinkDB release performance against a
modern time series database like Timescale[1].

[1] [https://www.timescale.com/](https://www.timescale.com/)

~~~
akulkarni
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. :-)

(I work at TimescaleDB.)

------
kclay
Rethinkdb, still wear my t-shirt from them for creating the the Scala
library[1]. Learned so much on that project. Fun times

[1][https://github.com/kclay/rethink-scala](https://github.com/kclay/rethink-
scala)

------
007lva
I'm not sure if Zerotier still uses Rethinkdb in production. Someone knows?

~~~
jiripospisil
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.

[https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-
transition/](https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/)

~~~
lux
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.

