Announcing RethinkDB 2.3.6: the first release under community governance

Announcing RethinkDB 2.3.6: the first release under community governance(rethinkdb.com)

128 points by TheMissingPiece 8 years ago | 23 comments

Just about to decide between Mongo and Rethink. I know HN is not on good terms with Mongo but I'd like to have insights on...

- Setup of a replica set: is it easier/faster than with Mongo (which I find complicated)?

- Sharding: Easier than with Mongo?

- Rethink's query language: Is it really better than Mongo's after you used it for some time?

Happy to hear more insights if you know more noteworthy stuff and please no bashing of any of them. Just try to make an educated decision.

timmaxw 8 years ago | |

Former rethinkdb developer here. Sharding and replication just work out of the box. Connect the servers to each other with "rethinkdb --join otherserver", then use the web dashboard or the client APIs to specify how many shards and replicas for each table. Send queries to any server in the cluster and they get routed automatically.

cupcakestand 8 years ago | | |

> Send queries to any server in the cluster and they get routed automatically.

Nice! Also the writes? Mongo wants the writes to the primary only.

kerkeslager 8 years ago | |

The problem with a feature comparison between Mongo and another database is that feature comparisons rarely include the features that Mongo lacks. Mongo looks good if you ask about sharding or replicating, but Mongo looks terrible if you ask about losing data or leaking memory. But nobody asks about losing data or leaking memory because they reasonably assume that a popular data store wouldn't do those things. That assumption, while reasonable, would be wrong.

Think of this like Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. Sharding and replication are up at the top with self-actualization stuff like job satisfaction and feeling love toward animals. Meanwhile Mongo is missing the real basic stuff, like actually keeping your data, which is down with food, water, and shelter. You might think you care about replication, but you don't care about replication when both your database servers run out of memory at the same time.

cupcakestand 8 years ago | | |

> but Mongo looks terrible if you ask about losing data or leaking memory

Sorry, but this is just not true for many years now. Mongo has its warts but reading old stuff again and again feels strange and like pure hate. If your claims have some recent sources I am happy to hear them.

brimstedt 8 years ago | |

Depending on what your goal is: Did you consider elasticsearch?

Reolication/clustering is real easy to set up.

Sharding is easy.

Scaling is easy.

I cant comment on query language vs mongo or rethink, since my experience with them is too limited.

gnur 8 years ago | | |

For one thing, it isn't really a database. You can use it as one, but where elasticsearch shines is mostly write once and read often.

Correctness isn't the primary focus, so unless you are willing to lose some stuff, don't use elasticsearch as your primary database.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/found-elasticsearch-as-nosql

styfle 8 years ago | | |

A couple more references regarding Elasticsearch as a primary datastore:

https://www.quora.com/Why-shouldnt-I-use-Elasticsearch-as-my...

https://stackoverflow.com/q/29841348/266535

_Codemonkeyism 8 years ago | |

After some years with Mongo I would not use Mongo again (we had some site downs).

It you do not need to push to the client, I'd use Postgres. It just works. For replication and sharding better wait for 10 though.

cupcakestand 8 years ago | | |

Can I use Postgres fully schemeless without even defining any collection (table) or db before doing the first write (which is possible with Mongo).

skrebbel 8 years ago |

Anyone got an insight into how well this is going? Compared to when the company was active, how fast is progress? Would you bet on Rethink in this day and age?

jwr 8 years ago | |

I did bet on it and so far I'm happy as long as it continues to work. Sure, I would like it to be developed further, but what I have now is great and works well.

As for progress, it slowed down to non-existent during the handover period, and now seems to be picking up.

egeozcan 8 years ago | | |

Great to hear that! Is there any issues close to being show-stoppers or any "it would have been immensely helpful to have this but I can work around it" features? Also, what would be the thing that RethinkDB is really good at that makes you keep using it?

dis-sys 8 years ago | |

well, you can have a quick look at how many commits in the last 3 months vs total number of commits they had so far.

not trying to judge anything as I no longer follow the project, but I think those numbers do tell the story.

bartvanH 8 years ago | | |

Looking at the graphs on github you could say development has slowed down, but i'd like to argue that since there is no commercial incentive anymore the project seems to be much more focussed on stability. And when bugfixing you write less lines while spending the same amount of time.

To me focus on stability is the most important thing in a database so this makes me happy as an ops person, get it stable first and then if needed add more features. though i think rethinkdb is already quite feature complete.

tracker1 8 years ago |

I'm really happy to see progress again. Hopefully we'll see more... I appreciate everyone that worked to make this possible.

side note: the node driver in npm still hasn't been re-published with the license type in the package.json, so doesn't show the license. Only noting as this can cause issues in some organizations.