RethinkDB's Open Source NoSQL Now Production-Ready

RethinkDB is now offering open source NoSQL designed for easily building and scaling an emerging breed of real-time applications and uses a new database access model to push data to the developer. The popular open source project has officially released its first commercially supported, production-ready version, RethinkDB 2.0.

Real-time application needs are on the rise, bolstered by the Internet of Things, real-time collaboration and multi-player gaming. Because these types of applications require that data be generally sent directly to the client, it requires rethinking the database, hence the name: RethinkDB.

The infrastructure behind real-time applications is tricky to set up, and RethinkDB aims to simplify the process. This production-ready version means it has undergone stability fixes and performance enhancements. Commercial support is being provided across the lifecycle.

RethinkDB CEO Slava Akhmechet said that current infrastructure tools were not designed for these emerging, real-time needs.

“We fundamentally changed the database architecture,” said Akhmechet. “Traditionally you send a query, and get a response. Instead of asking the user to send a query every time, we push data to the developer. We take care of all the routing and scalability needs.”

In addition to RethinkDB, there is a growing market for real-time sync pushers, such as the recently Google-acquired Firebase, a cloud service designed for similar kinds of applications.

RethinkDB offers three commercial services: development support, operational support and private, on-site training. “We provide development support for people building out products; we help them dramatically accelerate development, and we’re now offering ongoing production support as well,” said Akhmechet.

This support supplements that provided by a very active open source community behind RethinkDB.

The first production-ready release comes after more than 2,000 improvements, 16 major releases and five years of development, which makes RethinkDB 2.0 ready for a move to a wider audience.

The open source NoSQL project already has a broad reach. RethinkDB has 100,000 developers and hundreds of companies ranking from startups to big technology studios. It does well amongst the github crowd – it’s second most popular NoSQL database for that platform.

Akhmechet emphasized the importance of open source. “The product is open source, built around the open source development community with over 100 contributors. I want to thank them for their support and contribution; we’re very grateful.”

RethinkDB pushes JSON objects to apps in real-time, integrates with any stack, and can be used with dozens of languages and several frameworks. Developers can express data relationships using distributed joins, build location-aware apps, store multimedia and time series data. It can also use analytics with map/reduce and run sophisticated aggregation commands, along with speeding up apps using flexible indexing.