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Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

If you're currently using MongoDB in your stack and are finding yourselves outgrowing it or worried that an issue like this might pop up, you owe it to yourself to check out RethinkDB:

https://rethinkdb.com/

It's quite possibly the best document store out right now. Many others in this thread have said good things about it, but give it a try and you'll see.

Here's a technical comparison of RethinkDB and Mongo: https://rethinkdb.com/docs/comparison-tables/

Here's the aphyr review of RethinkDB (based on 2.2.3): https://aphyr.com/posts/330-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-2-3-reconfigu...

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How does it compare to Couchbase? That seems to be lighting the world on fire in that space lately.

RethinkDB's query language is infinitely better (among many things).

I'm not sure if lack of overbearing marketing speak counts for something, but RethinkDB definitely has that going for it.

I'm not an expert on couchbase (and neither on RethinkDB, to be frank, though I am a huge fan), but here's what RethinkDB has going for it:

- Changefeeds - easily open a persistent connection to the server and get updates when the results of an almost arbitrary query changes.

- Joins

- Expressive query language that is pretty functionally minded, really shines in their clojure/haskell drivers

- Excellent client libraries, well maintained

- Geospatial queries/objects

- Amazing admin interface (it has been amazing for a long time, too, not a recent change)

- First class consideration of replication & sharding (it is not a bolt-on in any way shape or form)

- API-driven cluster configuration

- API driven permissions management (this is relatively new)

- Excellent, easy to follow documentation

There are more things, but this is just what I can think of off the top of my head.

The team at RethinkDB is also just great -- I've met them in person and gotten help from them and they're straight shooters.

They've also got this great project coming up called Horizon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb1lH5mvYmU

Also they have a video up with a member of the team building a realtime game with React Native: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRK0SYSgVF0

Maybe someone who is very familiar with couchbase can help make a list... I'll start it off:

- Custom query language

- First class consideration for scale -- replication and sharding

I'm ex-Couchbase, so I can probably give a reasonably informed but independent view on this.

Firstly, regarding the marketing, it may not have been to many people's tastes - but it definitely worked, and achieved a lot of what was set out in terms of raising the awareness of what was a decent product that wasn't as well known as its competitors. There may be cases where people avoid it because they don't like the marketing, but the reality, having seen its effect, is they are in the minority, and would probably serve themselves better by assessing products based on technology rather than spiel.

Now, on the actual technology!

What Couchbase has historically been good at is highly scalable Key-Value access, at very high performance and low latency. Performance is comparable to Redis, but CB much more mature sharding, clustering and HA. e.g. fully online growing/shrinking of cluster, protection from node failures, rack/zone failures and data center failures. Redis may be a good fit for single-machine caching situations, and also has its own advantages in terms its datastructures support, etc.

Quality of SDK's is pretty subjective, but I'd say the 2.x re-write of Couchbase SDK's makes them very solid. The Java SDK in particular is extremely good both in performance and by providing native RxJava interfaces.

In terms of query interface, there's geospatial and a new freetext capability on the way.

Couchbase chose down to go down the route of a SQL based interface as their main query language. This seems to be a bit love/hate with developers with some delighted and some perplexed. Maybe for devs it should really be about higher level interfaces like Spring are increasingly important anyway?

The native interface being SQL based is usually very popular with the BI / Reporting side of things.

Changefeeds (continuous query?) is a feature not in Couchbase which I would very much like to see in the future. One thing I would say is that it's something you have to be very careful in the design of to ensure scalability and performance. Consistency is something which would obviously need thought as well.

horizon is already here https://horizon.io/

I assume Rethinkdb would not have this bug, could anyone from the team confirm this is the case?

Wouldn't that be like saying "Please confirm that MySQL doesn't have this Filemaker bug"?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a completely different database.

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