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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> over 70 million API requests a week.

Congratulations. However, if you're going to imply that traditional SQL databases are non-performant in comparison, you may want to do a bit more looking at the performance numbers both PostgreSQL and MySQL are capable of.

100+ million transactions per day is pretty easy to achieve with a traditional SQL DB. Also, you can do a lot of filtering in software specialized for those use cases, reducing the need to consume processing time in the Node.js V8 thread.

I don't want to knock RethinkDB here, just point out that there are stronger performance cases to be made.

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You're absolutely right - there's nothing stopping a standard MySQL setup pulling off the same stats, but it just wasn't what we were looking for, coupled with the various other decision points made in the post. RethinkDB's native ability to shard and scale is the key performance case to be made, in my opinion.

As mentioned by another user though, the filtering here is done entirely server-side (at RethinkDB's level), so the V8 thread performance isn't really a concern. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411738 for more info.

Yes, seconded. I read the article really interested in learning what level of capacity Rethink is capable of in the wild, but didn't get a great feel for that. It's not very helpful to frame database performance in operations per week. Peak load would be a better starting point.

You are correct, our customers (we sell a key/value store) manage 1B entries / day and do north of 500 million requests per day.

70 millions requests / week is actually very weak for a NoSQL database and should be left out of the promotion material.

The filter you see is actually compiled and sent to the server. The client isn't doing any filtering. This is actually one of the more powerful features in RethinkDB, IMO. The query language mimics local javascript.

The filtering done in this article is actually run on the server, not the client.

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