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Comment by jkarneges | Hacker News Reader

The article discusses how RethinkDB differs from "realtime sync services" such as Pusher, PubNub, and Firebase.

While comparing against Firebase makes sense because it's an alternative database, I see Pusher and PubNub (and similar pubsub services, such as Fanout) as being complementary to RethinkDB.

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This is definitely correct. The article focuses more on data synchronisation where as a lot of services (some of which jkarneges has highlighted) don't offer data storage and focus on letting you define your own feeds/channels/topics/subjects and exposing data updates/changes via messages or events. These services are highly complementary to RethinkDB as it's very easy to see how a channel subscription can map to a changefeeds.

So services Firebase, PubNub Data Sync, Realtime.co cloud storage, the Google Drive Realtime API and Simperium (see: http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide/...) are much more in-context to the article.

Article also points out that you can't get a "realtime incremental feed", but the example they provide is quite easy and similar in Firebase by using orderBy() and limit() to return an updating query.

As someone who has built lots of apps using Firebase, I can appreciate the first point about limited querying capabilities; this has been my number 1 painpoint from Firebase. I'd imagine the second point can be somewhat validated by changes() allowing for much more complex queries than are currently possible with sync services.

Author here -- my mistake, this was a bad example! You're right, this will become much more relevant as the `changes` command supports more and more complex queries.

This is tricky because PubNub recently added some data storage capabilities, and Pusher and fanout might follow suit. Also, being able to get a feed on queries might ultimately make services like Pusher unnecessary in many traditional situations, but this isn't immediately obvious. We'll find out soon how this develops!

I can speak for Fanout and say that we have no intention of offering data storage. Our ideal users either have databases already or value a decoupled backend architecture.

BaaS is certainly a tempting business (just look at all the exits), but we'd rather focus on doing one thing really well and with wider applicability. Much like you guys, really.

agree

and also GO FANOUT

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