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RethinkDB Gets Acquired By the Cloud Native Compute Foundation; Joins the Linux Foundation (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes:The Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) today announced that it has acquired the RethinkDB copyright and assets, including its code, and contributed it to The Linux Foundation. RethinkDB, which had raised about $12.2 million in venture capital for its open-source database, went out of business in October 2016. The CNCF says it paid $25,000 to complete this transaction. The code will now be available under the Apache license.
As a former RethinkDB employee I am more than a little biased, but I don't think that you understand the competitive space around MongoDB. Everything you have sited as an advantage for MongoDB is done better by just about every one of their competitors (RethinkDB included). MongoDB's main advantage is that they were the first big on in the field, and no-one has been able to make something better enough to de-seat them. It is not enough to be better, you have to be noticeably better in order to de-seat a reigning competitor. Think of the phrase "no one gets fired for buying IBM".
And I also don't think you understand the cost of polling, especially for non-trivial (e.g.: not key-lookup) queries. While RethinkDB's `join` queries are not included in `changefeeds`, just about everything else is. So for example if you wanted to keep a leaderboard, say the top 10 scores in a game, you would have to re-compute that every time in most databases (at a minimum scan the index). With RethinkDB it automatically gets modified based on writes in the database, and sent to you. The efficiency improvement is truly huge. And since those queries can be fairly complicated (say: top 10 scores within the week), that gets very expensive with polling.
An example that is in usage right now from a major stock trader: their iOS app uses RethinkDB to get streaming stock-price updates. The app (indirectly through a server) just opens a changefeed on the list of stocks that you follow, and RethinkDB coordinates who needs to get what updates when they feed in the stream of changes of market prices. They don't have a ton of clients constantly polling in order to show them constantly changing feeds of numbers (some change every second, others not in hours), and they can push out changes as fast as they get them.