https://rethinkdb.com/docs/sql-to-reql/javascript/
The more complex the query becomes I just felt everything was getting less intuitive compared to the SQL version and ended up not actually using it.
For anyone who switched from SQL, I'd like to know how it felt to write RethinkDB queries. Did they start to feel fluent later on?
It took a few weeks for ReQL to really sink in, but once it did, I much preferred it to SQL. As my sibling comment says, its very linear: do this then this then this then this. It also feels very much like sequence processing in functional languages (and I was using Clojure at the time, so it really meshed very well).
I also found it much easier (than SQL, at least in my limited experience) to reason about performance because I knew what it was doing. Is this looked up by index? Yes, because that's the command I used.
So, yeah, ReQL actually ended up being one of the things I liked most about RethinkDB.
With ReQL you new exactly how indexes were being used, and how the data was being accessed. No trying to guess what the query optimizer was doing in the background.
I have much love for the Rethink team. I am glad to see they are doing their best to support the community during this difficult time.
We have a similar page at ArangoDB to help developers used to SQL to understand the general differences in AQL: https://www.arangodb.com/why-arangodb/sql-aql-comparison/